“... When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher ...”

“... last joke in 1988 when she made an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions ...”

“... days: in doing so, they also throw a good deal of unintentional light on the reasons for its fall. Michael Stewart and Douglas Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to ...”

“... problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd afterwards – but good examples of the form have other attractions. They usually seem to owe their durability to elements in them that are gratuitous, strictly speaking. The sleuths don’t really need all ...”

“... of detective stories, but the view he expressed here seems uncomfortably close to that of Edmund Wilson, who hated the whole business. ‘I find it very difficult,’ Auden said, to read a detective story ‘that is not set in rural England’. Some of us find it difficult to read one that is set in rural England. The difference of taste is not trivial, or ...”

“... Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a ...”

“... makes me remember when I was a boy and the series in, I think, the Hotspur or the Wizard about Wilson. Wilson was a tall sinewy man of indeterminate age, modest, taciturn, mysterious, who in a typical episode would bring off some amazing feat of endurance – running a vast distance in a seemingly impossible ...”

“... obsessive obeisance to the United States – later turned out to be justified. On Europe, Harold Wilson was at his Wilsonian worst, first deriding the Conservative Party’s European policy, then adopting it, then attacking and attempting to defeat Heath’s successful application to join the Six, then vowing to renegotiate Heath’s terms of entry, before ...”

“... new editor. De Quincey came to see that it was Edinburgh where he had to make his mark, with John Wilson, editor of Blackwood’s, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, and de Quincey’s contact and pal. (In his study of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, John Gross describes Wilson as ‘a pest’.) De Quincey ...”

“... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...”

“... In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of discipline. ‘Guess which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History ...”

“... subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick ...”

“... rather than personal history. Dreams employed very permissively a technique the literary theorist Michael André Bernstein has called ‘backshadowing’: a device of conventional narrative whereby significant moments, leading to a climax or a large recognition, are inserted with teleological pointers at early stages of the plot. History, in this way, is ...”

“... judges recommended a tariff of 15 years; the Home Secretary imposed a sentence of 20. In 1995, Michael Howard explicitly referred to the quasi-judicial nature of his role: ‘The prisoner is aware of the judicial view and has the opportunity to make representations. He is then told of the tariff set. If there is any departure from the judicial advice, he ...”

“... by Luc Delahaye, Agata Madejska, Simon Norfolk, Stephen Shore, Shomei Tomatsu, Jane and Louise Wilson and many others – in skilful juxtaposition.) McCullin reappears later in the show, this time photographing in Berlin in 1961 as the Wall is erected: curious US troops peer over the new barrier. This sequence is labelled ‘16 Years Later’, as though ...”