“... else in the 19th century before there was any genetics to get right – the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson will have none of that: ‘The man was always right.’ Uniquely among the sciences, evolutionary biology comes with a patronymic, and so another oddity is why – if we take some of the wilder rhetorical flourishes literally – evolutionary theory is ...”

“... omnipotence has survived into the digital age. Politicians apparently wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of ...”

“... constructing and hiding from each other in their diaries, clearly with posterity in mind. A.N. Wilson’s Life will do the job; read side by side the two books provide an extraordinary record of the private turmoil from which great narrative so often springs. Nothing could be more sharply focused and transparent than Tolstoy’s prose, nothing more ...”

“... novels were selling strongly and being urgently discussed: one was lyrical and would-be Proustian (Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance); the other was bilious and aspired to satire (Larry Kramer’s Faggots). I disliked them both, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that gay literary culture had room for two such opposite productions, could ...”

“... In 1917, justifying his reluctance to involve the United States in the European war, Woodrow Wilson told his secretary of state that ‘white civilisation and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’ Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First ...”

“... have heard this story before, or something very like it. In December 1918 President Woodrow Wilson, a desiccated version of Clinton, arrived in Paris to set the world to rights. Led by France, the embittered European victors traded a polite enthusiasm for Wilson’s pet idea, the League of Nations, in return for the ...”

“... freedom, as far away as possible from the white man’s freedom to dominate others, as espoused by Andrew Jackson, George Wallace and Trump. These radical traditions have always been embattled, but they have not vanished, and they have been enriched and reinvented by successive waves of immigration.Athird generation​ American, born in 1972, I am an heir to ...”

“... showed a good deal more confidence, and their work transcends mere period interest. In Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After (1952), fellow gay writers and readers found their world described with a liberating candour and naturalness new to British literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer ...”

“... an ‘orderly transition’. Blair is therefore deeply impressed by a letter he gets from Andrew Adonis, setting his predicament in historical context. 1. There are no ‘dignified exits’ and ‘orderly transitions’ – just exits and transitions, all more or less ragged and unsatisfactory. That’s life, I suppose. 2. The more successful prime ...”

“... supremacist came from the more perceptive critics of a former colony: Randall Jarrell and Edmund Wilson, the title of whose essay, ‘The Kipling Nobody Reads’, tells its own story. Perhaps his ghost has done penance enough; time seems to have pardoned him for writing well and to have forgiven him his views. Ricketts’s biography, and ...”

“... into the major leagues of bestsellerdom and landed him on the cover of Time, his wheaty, squinty, Andrew Wyeth-esque head bearing solemn witness to ‘The Adulterous Society’. Prefaced with a quotation from Paul Tillich and with a high-gloss finish (‘his phallus sheer silver’ etc), Couples lent itself usefully to brow-furrowed editorial ponderings on ...”

“... which has somehow got out of hand . . . A poverty of invention which is almost pathetic,’ Edmund Wilson wrote in 1956. ‘A combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh,’ the poet John Heath-Stubbs joshed at around the same time. ‘My nightmare,’ added Germaine Greer.The quite funny one-liners abound, but it’s much harder to find someone writing sensibly ...”

“... to stray into his territory. Indeed, he goes out of his way to say that ‘I did not do a Harold Wilson and publicly criticise Mervyn, even when on further occasions he volunteered advice on our fiscal policy.’ All he will say is that he called him in for a private chat, and reminded him of their understanding ‘that I would not comment on monetary policy ...”

“... opened in New York where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon’) Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his ...”

“... corpus of anecdotes to work with, untrustworthy tales retrieved and rehearsed by Gilchrist, Mona Wilson and the rest. The interpretations – efforts to understand their own incomprehension – attempted by other poets: Rossetti, Yeats, Swinburne, Ruthven Todd, Kathleen Raine. The inducting of Blake into a spiritual brotherhood. The bones of the life ...”