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“... 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 ...”

“... because their careers were too long for any one writer to encompass comprehensively; Charles James Fox and Lloyd George because their passion to rule and their ruling passions are so hard to reconcile; and the younger Pitt and Baldwin because the weight of the times nearly suffocates the life. Most of these ...”

“... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were corrupting, degrading and tormenting ...”

“... Group of Catholic intellectuals, which, in Grisewood’s words, was ‘so far to the right of Mr Baldwin as to be off the map of English party politics altogether’. On 24 April 1939, Jones wrote to Grisewood that he was ‘deeply impressed’ with Mein Kampf while finding it ‘pretty terrifying too’. That same month, Grisewood, who believed that ‘the ...”

“... leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper should be an independent voice. Launched in August 1843, it was ...”

“... on typography, publishers on publishing, lawyers on the law, copyright experts on copyright, Sir James Pitman on shorthand, Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline ...”

“... the historian of modern Wales): its emphasis on the Party’s Welsh component (Mabon, Noah Ablett, James Griffiths, Aneurin Bevan). Morgan also has a sharp eye for important or significant but neglected figures. How right he is, for example, to see the career of the political scientist Harold Laski as one of ‘intense and enduring human interest as a tale of ...”