“... Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not repeat itself, is there any reason why royal biography ...”

“... Lloyd George preferred to parade his thoughts before a handful of sympathetic Liberal journalists. Baldwin kept amiably distant. Neville Chamberlain, while courting the newsmen, was most accessible to papers soundly Conservative in tone. Churchill remained aloof except to the more exalted proprietorial ranks, though an editor or two would occasionally be ...”

“... in the work that led to the setting-up of the National Health Service. The world of Stanley Baldwin contained more reasons for admiring W.H. Auden than this book understands. The sense of having read a genuinely responsible work of history of science remains. To take only the most obvious examples from Kevles’s last chapters: his useful warnings ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The figures who were at the helm of the AIA – Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe, James Holland, James Fitton, James Boswell, Betty Rea, Nan Youngman, Clive Branson – are largely forgotten. The first two may be known to aficionados of design and of children’s books and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... comparison. Her later documentaries, Sud (1999, filmed in Jasper, Texas, following the lynching of James Byrd Jr and inspired by her reading of James Baldwin) and De l’autre côté (2002, filmed in Agua Prieta and Douglas, on either side of the US-Mexico border), use the same formal strategies as D’Est. If, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”