“... record of the inner workings of the Labour Party during the transition from the Attlee era to the Wilson years. The period covered saw the Bevanite revolt in the early 1950s, the subsequent emergence of a revisionist critique of socialism, and the efforts by Hugh Gaitskell to fight and fight again to save the party which many of his political heirs have now ...”

“... they are the better their evidence is, at least in a sense. Welsh shows how the evidence against Tom Jones is seen and manipulated by Fielding as a man of the law, a man accustomed to hearing and weighing probabilities. To judge from the metaphors he uses, Shakespeare had great zest in legal ideology and practice, while there is a sense in which the whodunit ...”

“... In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial. Lionel Trilling called The Professor’s House ‘lame’ and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found ...”

“... of The Lord of the Rings. The critical judgments of reviewers such as Philip Toynbee and Edmund Wilson are explained by the animosity generated by the Oxford English School’s old and false distinction between Language and Literature. Tolkien had little time for literary critics, although literary criticism was an activity for which he himself had unusual ...”

“... biography. Not all libraries have yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications ...”

“... up with the 19-year-old Princess Anne: Tyrrel borrows from another royal biographer, Christopher Wilson, the speculation that ‘it was to Andrew’ that Anne ‘surrendered her virginity’. It wasn’t that Camilla was worried he might marry Anne (Andrew was Catholic and therefore out of the question) but that he had bagged the most high-profile catch ...”

“... much liked Mosley, consoled herself with the thought that ‘she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands.’ (Mosley was always known as ‘Tom’ just as Cynthia was known as ‘Cimmie’.) Mosley himself, in his autobiography, described his marriage to Cimmie as ‘an event in my life of outstanding ...”

“... Community. He ended up voting for the Greens.Farage going Green is just one of many moments in Tom McTague’s mesmerising account of the backstory to Britain’s eventual exit from the EU that capture the capacity of the European question to make a mockery of British politics. Sometimes the interplay between fragile party allegiances and European ...”

“... British state.3 This history has its own familiar antiheroes: MacDonald, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock, Blair, Brown, Miliband. That this is to list nearly all of Labour’s leaders is part of the point. (What is not so frequently mentioned is that much of the conservatism of the Labour Party when it came to the empire, monarchy, the ...”

“... and those deported to the Australian mainland survived. (William Lanne, the ‘last man’ of Tom Lawson’s title, died in 1869; two Tasmanian women survived him briefly.) There is also disagreement about the way they met their end, or rather about the relative roles played by settler violence, intertribal conflict, exogenous diseases, declining ...”

“... figure in Jackson’s book were buzzing about the Sillars camp. Two of them – Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with fervently pro-market ...”

“... Haiti and Liberia were even reminded that Ireland had never engaged in the slave trade. President Wilson should, it was thought, be treated as a sincere man ‘striving to give effect to his programme of freedom for all nations and struggling against all the forces of tyranny, imperialism and lusty world power which are seeking to dominate the Peace ...”

“... such an idiot, that girl,’ she said. ‘How so?’ ‘She’s going out with Kenny Wilson now. Which is bad enough. The thing is, Kenny hasn’t told Agnes, and when she finds out, it’s going to get nasty.’ I racked my brain. I tried to picture Kenny Wilson, but I couldn’t place him, and I didn’t ...”

“... Some Labour MPs​ always had their doubts about the 1998 Scotland Act. According to Tom Harris, former Labour MP for Glasgow South, there was a joke in the Commons tearoom: ‘Line 1, between “there shall” and “be a Scottish Parliament”, insert “not”.’ Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in every single election ...”

“... major trade-union leader of recent times was under regular surveillance by MI 5 ... Yet both Wilson and Heath forbade any interrogation.’ Pincher does not exaggerate the importance of the pre-war Cambridge connection, with one exception. That is John Cairncross, a non-smart Cambridge man of Scottish working-class background, who though detected in 1951 ...”