“... following the Dutch lead. ‘If TNT has its way, five days would be reduced to three,’ said John Baldwin, the CWU’s head of international affairs. ‘TNT is the bogeyman of the postal industry but they are not alone. Royal Mail, frankly, isn’t going to argue if it’s going to be released from the five-day obligation.’ Richard Hooper’s first report ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“... True or false? 1. Winston Churchill sent in troops against striking miners at Tonypandy. 2. Stanley Baldwin confessed with ‘appalling frankness’ that he did not rearm because he would have lost the 1935 General Election. 3. Ernest Bevin said of the Labour Party’s relations with the Soviet Union: ‘Left can speak to Left ...”

“... the first half of the 20th century, when the leaders were Balfour, Bonar Law, Austen Chamberlain, Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and Churchill. In the second half of the century they were Churchill again, Eden, Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Heath, Thatcher and John Major – a more mixed bunch, admittedly, but still mostly distinguished and competent. That ...”

“... That Got Away (1992). ‘I read the Bible, the Koran, all of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke,’ the preternaturally gifted, four-year-old narrator of Everett’s tenth novel, Glyph (1999), announced, in a passage that might have doubled as an abbreviated list of the author’s own interests. (The literary ones, at ...”

“... two-by-four inch scraps he carried in his pocket. At the office, his stenographers, Mrs Hester Baldwin and Marguerite Flynn, made transcripts. During night hours and on weekends, he transformed the confusion of these typed up ‘miscellanies’ into poems.This prose section is followed by a poem sequence, ‘118 Westerly Terrace’ (Stevens’s home ...”

“... dies. Journalists who worked for Beaverbrook speak of him with a combination of awe and affection. James Macmillan and John Ellison, who were so much of the Daily Express for so long, describe this slow, mocking North American voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked ...”

“... moral exhortation. After leaving office for the last time, he was more widely compared to Stanley Baldwin, a national conciliator and broker of industrial peace. In 1957 his chief ally in the Labour Party, Richard Crossman, complained in his diary that Wilson ‘grows fatter, more complacent and more evasive each time you meet him’ – and then resolved to ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, ...”

“... to tell their own stories. In fiction they are murdered, commit suicide or die of Aids. One of James Baldwin’s characters, the devastated bisexual jazz drummer Rufus, throws himself off a bridge; Baldwin thought he himself would have ended up being dragged from a river if he’d stayed in New York and not ...”

“... Twenty years after Balfour had ceased to be prime minister, and by then in his late seventies, Baldwin sought him out to shore up his fragile government. He remained indispensable to the last. Yet, if brutally summarised, the concrete results of his efforts can only seem pitiful. He fought three general elections as party leader and lost them all. The ...”

“... adventurer, a Hornblower, a Scarlet Pimpernel, that favourite reading matter of mine as a child. Baldwin Wake Walker was his full name, and he had entered the British navy in 1812, when he was ten, was posted to the West Indies, and made a lieutenant by the age of 18. He was destined thereafter to spend far more time travelling and fighting in the British ...”

“... is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the ...”

“... with the cultural nationalism of the country in which he grew up. He got to know Henry James, read Proust, studied Bergson and took an interest in pre-Christian religious practices, a subject on which his sources were more up to date than T.S. Eliot’s. In the 1890s his stories appeared in the Bodley Head quarterly The Yellow Book and Virginia ...”

“... the greatest party of them all, the party of mediocrity, would have scored one more triumph – Baldwin as PM. There is, by the way, no specific treatment of WSC’s relationship with the Tory Party in this book, although the subject comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and ...”