“... in which the angel foretells not a Christian parousia but the unaccountable birth each time my lord the light, a cat and you share this domestic miracle. The book’s strategically-placed concluding poem, ‘For a Godchild’, makes it clear how little Tomlinson is tempted by any miraculous other than the sublunary: it decides to educate his godchild out ...”

“... years there was nothing else – no new poems. New Zealand poetry in the Sixties was dominated by James K. Baxter (born 1926) – a Byronic figure at once careless, prolific and brilliant who had (in the phrase I think Russians use of writers after Gogol) crawled out from Curnow’s overcoat, and who for a few years seemed destined to eclipse his master. In ...”

“... at the price of an incomes policy that eventually drove the low-paid into revolt. The last days of James Callaghan, with grave-diggers on strike and NUPE pulling the plug on hospital patients, were piteous and shameful and the ‘winter of discontent’ ensured the victory of Mrs Thatcher. Though Labour were out, the future was still uncertain. Few realised in ...”

“... Of the BBC we hear of ‘its growing reputation for anti-British views’, while we learn that James Reston and Ben Bradlee (of the Washington Post) art ‘left-wing trendies’. Georgetown University, the haunt of so many Reaganite super-hawks (including Jeanne Kirkpatrick), is rubbished as having ‘moved sharply to the Left’. This sort of thing is ...”

“... back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson continued with his allegations, the security services felt reprieved. Wright’s ...”

“... physical assets and fewer human assets as well. They thus have to insure more against the future. James Duesenberry has proposed that spending on luxuries competes with saving, and will increase in direct proportion to the desire to maintain or improve one’s standing. On this view, American blacks save more because at any given level of income they have ...”

“... was sentenced to seven years, Ellis to six years and Keeling to two years. The recorder of London, James Miskin, berated Ridgewell and Ellis: ‘Without any excuse or explanation, you helped others ship out of this depot Lord knows how much stolen property, and I shall never know where it went or who got what from the ...”

“... O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady Windermere’s Fan ... The nymphomaniac pensioners in ‘The Sexy Old Ladies of Havergo Hall’ are less discriminating in their pursuit of pleasure: If it breathes, and wears trousers, they move in ...”

“... is now on exhibition’. The despoliation of Poland and Russia by the Nazis is not comparable to Lord Elgin’s endeavours in Athens. But the reason Elgin gave for removing chunks of the Parthenon (with Turkish permission) was similar to the one quoted above: he wanted to save the marbles from being destroyed by Turkish and Greek soldiers. The Germans were ...”

“... should be bad: he despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather ...”

“... which had scarred the early stages of the conflict, that the sporting spirit was not enough. Lord Rosebery, presenting the FA Cup in 1897, might assert that football helped bring out those ‘splendid characteristics of the British race – stamina and indomitable pluck’ (I take the quotation from one of the first works to bring the history of sport in ...”

“... right, and specialists in erotica. Ian McIntyre, a long-serving BBC producer and the biographer of Lord Reith, has no obvious prejudices but risks seeming too distanced from his subject. Unfortunately even this is a position well represented in the long history of Burns commentary. The standard biographer addresses a middle-class audience with a message ...”

“... long reign and hankered for a change. When that change materialised, however, in the person of James I, they became increasingly unsure that they liked it. The story Dobson and Watson have to tell really begins with that little group of plays by Heywood and Dekker which in the early Jacobean years brought several ‘squeaking’ Elizabeths onto the public ...”

“... womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to that extent. It would be surprising if people ...”

“... efforts of Samuel Joseph, who capped a successful business career with a less happy term as Lord Mayor of London during the Second World War. For Keith Joseph, born in 1918 and himself a product of Harrow and Oxford, Bovis was not only an inspiring model of entrepreneurship: it was a milch cow allowing him to function as a political grandee. He hung on ...”