“... Alex Salmond’s predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, the social democrat Gordon Wilson, happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between ...”

“... the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about ...”

“... to help arrange a meeting at Ruskin College where Cliff spoke and was seconded by C.L.R. James, who made an electrifying speech on the reality of imperialist war. If it seemed faintly improbable, on the cusp of 1968, to believe in a group that advocated revolution without illusions, at least one could see every day that the careerist supporters of ...”

“... He was always around the corner and out of sight,’ Henry James wrote of his older brother William as a child. ‘He was clear out before I got well in.’ The philosopher C.S. Peirce said something similar about the grown man. ‘He so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents.’ Josiah Royce, a life-long friend and Harvard colleague of William James, with whom he agreed philosophically scarcely ever, offered a fine parody of the pragmatism so closely associated with his companion’s name ...”

“... In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely – the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago ...”

“... willing to spend more on feeding themselves than on washing. In the 1880s, Lever and his brother James – the children of a grocer from Bolton – had created Sunlight soap, one of the biggest brands in late Victorian England. The breakthrough wasn’t the soap itself, but the way it was marketed: in individual bars packaged in colourful boxes, rather than ...”

“... course, as it is now, but as it used to be in the good old days, before it was corrupted by Harold Wilson and infiltrated by the Militant Tendency. That Labour Party, after all, was the party most of us joined and went into politics to fight for: if it had survived, we would be in it still. It is tempting to assume that what is true of us must also be true of ...”

“... not resent it. I look upon it as very natural.’ In the face of attacks from the likes of Edmund Wilson (who called him ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers who do not care much about writing’), Maugham could, and did, point to his supersized audience, implying that you’d have to be very serious indeed to ...”

“... In an obituary note written after she finally succumbed to colon cancer in 1897, Henry James paid characteristically equivocal tribute to this most prolific of women writers: ‘from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious treatment.’ His obituary hovered between contempt for helpless female fecundity ...”

“... Northern Ireland in April 1974. By 1976, the back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although ...”

“... performance in France and Belgium in the First World War has received mixed reviews. General Sir James Edmonds, editor of the official history of the war, declared Allenby’s record on the Western Front ‘one of gross stupidity from first to last’. On the other hand, Colonel Repington, the influential military correspondent of the Times, pronounced him ...”

“... activities are located abroad, mainly in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. (The bank’s founder, James Wilson, also founded the Economist.) In August 2012, the New York State Department of Financial Services – a new regulator, formed in October 2011 to simplify and beef up supervision of finance in the state – accused the bank of running a scheme to ...”

“... supporting Biafra when the newspaper, under the Foreign Editor, Frank Giles, was supporting the Wilson Government which, with the Russians, was secretly arming the Nigerians, who were bombing Biafra. Wyndham, Richard West and, at first, McCullin, were all passionate Biafra lobby-ists. It led to considerable tension. Soon after I joined the staff, towards ...”

“... in the first session of Congress offer a variation on the theme. What did men like John Adams and James Madison accomplish in the first legislature? The state needed funds, so the great political theorists haggled and horse-traded about whom to tax. First there was a proposed levy on molasses. The Virginians suggested six cents per gallon, New England, which ...”

“... a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their ...”