“... turned it into an unrivalled instrument of British policy and won their lasting adoration (which David Owen sourly put down to ‘inverted snobbery’). As minister of labour between 1940 and 1945, Bevin achieved with remarkably little agony the greatest mobilisation and demobilisation in British history. Churchill deserves every credit for seeing that this ...”

“... motifs are intertwined with contemporary academic and sexual politics, clearly owes a good deal to David Lodge; the theme of the lost literary legacy invokes The Aspern Papers; James might be cited again in relation to the book’s punning deployment of ‘possession’ as a term of material, erotic and demonic significance, an association that also reminds ...”

“... and instantly recognisable’ African rhythm) to the ‘folk-songs’ of the British Isles like ‘David of the White Rock’, ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Oh, No, John, No!’ All represented the ‘music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions’. Robeson’s early preference of spirituals to ...”

“... for the irruption on the scene of a femme fatale in the shape of Marcelle Georgius, daughter of a French music hall entertainer. Swooping on a vulnerable target, she broke down any Calvinist inhibitions he may have retained, wrecked his marriage (not without assistance from the man himself) and carried him off to Caxton Hall, where she is supposed to have ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... the short-sighted pragmatism of the British civil servants with the bold imaginativeness of their French opposite numbers of the Commissariat du Plan and the recruits from the grandes écoles; a myopia that made them dismiss the Schumann Plan and the whole idea of Europe as airy-fairy nonsense. But would new blood from outside Whitehall, whether recruited ...”

“... by his side. He died on a cold day in January, and they prayed for him in chapel. We are not in a French-Canadian Catholic school, because of the portrait of the founder in the entrance hall, ‘the school’s chief financial rock, a fruit importer who had abandoned Presbyterianism for the Church of England when a sudden rise in wealth and status demanded the ...”

“... before he had been provoked either by libel or ‘sustained vilification’. It started at David Frost’s house in July 1975 when Frost (who told the story to Peter Jay) introduced Goldsmith to Wilson and Falkender. Since both Goldsmith and Wilson had, at different times, declared that the Eye was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and social ...”

“... Wagner soon discovered how little this really meant: hundreds of such letters were written by the French cultural élite about outsiders, who rarely succeeded in penetrating the charmed circle. By way of reaction, Wagner took as his model those musicians who rejected society and patronage: the dead Beethoven, whose work Wagner consistently championed and ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... fellows living in college. Who more suitable than young Maud? The name had only to be mentioned to David Lindsay Keir and the job was done. Politics was to be his subject, it seems suddenly to have been decided. ‘But why politics?’ Why indeed? Anyhow, G.D.H. Cole put him on to the subject of local government; the Home University Library wanted a book on it ...”

“... red over her wide mouth.’ This is not a novel of scenes but a meditation on experience in the French tradition. One problem is how far Frances is presented ironically. The sharpening of her self-knowledge often seems excessively depreciatory, while her bedazzlement by the aura and gusto of the Frasers can hardly be shared by the reader: we can’t look at ...”

“... began to distance themselves from Moscow. The Spanish and Italian Parties, followed by the French, used the term ‘Eurocommunism’ – but it was not enough to revive the faith that Khrushchev’s speech had destroyed. Medvedev’s discussion of Khrushchev’s motives in denouncing Stalinism – partly a move in the internal power struggle and partly ...”

“... defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most serious result of the under-representation of secondary education on the ...”

“... the possibility of making an atomic bomb before they received Fuchs’s first report: Moss cites David Holloway’s book The Soviet Union and the Arms Race for evidence that it was this report which caused Stalin to give the project the highest priority. The former head of the Institute of Nuclear Research in East Germany estimates that Fuchs saved the ...”