“... won the premiership, lost it, and won it back again, retiring from Parliament in 1964. Even Alec Douglas-Home had a second act after losing the election of 1964, serving as foreign secretary under Edward Heath. These are the lucky ones. A different fate awaited Jim Callaghan, who drifted into a burdensome obscurity after losing the 1979 election and ...”

“... spectacle. But then neither is the squealing of toffs when they feel put upon. Only the other day, Charles Moore (Eton, Cambridge, Spectator, Telegraph) compared Old Etonians to persecuted Jews. Both the pulling and the squealing point to a society in distress, to a sense of national claustrophobia, to a place where too many closed doors promote envy ...”

“... This is the first volume to appear in the ‘Fontana History of Modern France’, edited by Douglas Johnson, which will eventually cover the period from the Ancien Régime to the present day. The intention is presumably to provide the student and general reader with a synthesis of the enormous amount of new writing on French history since Alfred Cobban published his much shorter history of modern France twenty years ago ...”

“... society any country should be proud to copy,’ while also wondering whether he wouldn’t one day be ‘back for good in my own country’. In fact, the D’Oliveiras, despite many return trips to South Africa, still live in the shadow of Worcester cathedral. Both D’Oliveira himself and Peter Oborne comment repeatedly on the spontaneous goodwill the ...”

“... and Hollywood films as found images: Pierre Huyghe has reshot parts of the Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon with the real-life protagonist (a reluctant bank-robber) returned to the lead role, and Douglas Gordon has adapted a couple of Hitchcock films in drastic ways (his 24 Hour Psycho slows down the original to a ...”

“... called ‘Reflections on humanity’ ends with the characteristically deceptive thought for the day ‘That only the very worst literature is foreign:/ That practically no life at all is.’ Douglas Dunn thinks that these earlier poems are not only Enright’s best, but that they ‘stand among the best poems of their ...”

“... a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the day of the massacre of Christians in Delhi’. It is no small irony that here, where the mixed-blooded Skinners lie at rest, the blood of Indians and Britons would be copiously spilled in vicious partisan conflict. Throughout the winter months of 1857 there had ...”

“... Gordon will go quietly, however rough the going gets, is badly mistaken. 12 May. For the second day running the spotlight is on the Tories. Not for them sordid little claims for bath plugs or plasma TVs. No, they’ve been at it on an altogether different scale, with outrageous claims for housekeepers, repairs to tennis courts, swimming-pools; there’s ...”

“... and sensibly, changed to DARKENS when the board was displayed on Good Morning America the next day. The total disjunction between the semantics of Scrabble and those of English is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in which they are imagined to converge. At one point in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, stuck on ...”

“... in 1982; was knighted in 1991. Not Entitled takes us through a grim but not unhappy childhood in Douglas (‘It as a world in which everybody was more or less ill. Heart, stomach, nerves were the ground bass of conversation, the tune specifying a tumour or a stroke of unprecedented severity, a disaster in what were called the waterworks’), and through the ...”

“... novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady Douglas as she became, has been redeemed from the archives of the Border nobility, with the blessing of a former prime minister, Lord Home. The memoir appears to have been written at some point in the 1820s, and is addressed to Frances’s daughter in order to ...”

“... and the boy, Tyler, is at the stage of puberty that makes family road trips a trial. All day, he has been dreaming of literally opening people up, focusing intently on the space between women’s thighs, trying to see through their clothes, imagining himself carving a long slit in a man’s chest to expose his entrails. Alone in the motel room that ...”

“... power had seen it coming for a decade and it was an open secret that a “great war” would one day be necessary to sort out the simmering quarrels and rivalries that were bubbling to the boil in Europe.’ There is of course contemporary material which after the event appears to support such opinions. But compare the pre-1914 situation with the evidence of ...”

“... out, and turns against the architect of the match, Thomas Cromwell, who is beheaded on the very day his king marries Katherine Howard, niece of Cromwell’s arch-enemy the reactionary Duke of Norfolk (who in Mantel’s version resembles an ungenial version of Sir Ector in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone). As Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, puts it in The ...”

“... departmental training – which means that army training has to be concentrated into 5/8 of the day, and is therefore increasing in savagery. This blitztraining is, to my mind, anabsurd. The RAOC lost 10 per cent of its personnel in Belgium, through being noncombatant. They aim, therefore, at making us combatant, in nine weeks; at the end of that time we ...”