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“... early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer with chickens, bought off, and the long argument between preservers of game and chasers ...”

“... in the 1930s. Maxton didn’t see himself as a leader in the way that his contemporary Ramsay MacDonald did. He thought of himself more as a representative than a politician, and as Brown’s biography shows, it’s striking how certain he was that he expressed the views of those he represented and on whose behalf he fought: children and the unemployed ...”

“... blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath’. George MacDonald Fraser’s series of novels about him – known collectively as The Flashman Papers, the first of which appeared in 1969 – are, I would guess, read much more widely than their worthy Victorian forebear, and deservedly so. Ditching all that pious ...”

“... interest to anyone but himself, they are at least factual. This point is reached by Hugh Macdonald’s Music in 1853. Macdonald might not need consolation. He is the author of books that palpably enrich and illuminate. His Master Musicians Berlioz is one of the best volumes in that series. He has been a brilliant ...”

“... talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the Party were numerous well before the First World War broke out. During that war, a number of Labour men served in government (not, of course, ...”

“... this hotchpotch of a party will expire before the next general election. Incidentally, how much David Owen must be regretting that the SDP is still alive. If he had remained in the Labour Party nothing could have prevented his becoming its leader. Perhaps the Executive Committee of the Labour Party could dispatch a telegram saying: ‘Come back, ...”

“... she reminds him of Hardy’s Eustacia Vye. His sea-loving family recalls the Peggotys in David Copperfield. His uncle at the tiller is like Tashtego in Moby-Dick. His mother, on the other hand, has not read a book since high school – ‘then she had read Ivanhoe and considered it a colossal waste of time.’ While her son sits at school discussing ...”

“... campaigns for a series of Liberal wannabes – Samuel Montagu, Jane Cobden and J.A. Murray Macdonald – before, like many of his generation, switching over in 1892 to Henry Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. A year later, he was elected to the Poplar Poor Law Board. Poplar now became the Lansbury family’s fiefdom. He himself was a guardian ...”

“... selection’ of biographies, he does not flinch from analysing those who reached the top – MacDonald, Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson. But he has just as much to say about those dedicated but less well-known people who did so much to build up the Labour Party’s machine: Henderson, Morrison, Dalton and Rita Hinden. And in the figure of Morgan Phillips this ...”

“... stuff than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work ...”

“... in erring on the side of facilitating atrocity in real time’. Our new foreign secretary, David Cameron, may be ‘worried’ that Israel is breaking international law, but doesn’t think it’s up to him to make a ‘legal adjudication’.If bare-faced lies and interpretative denial don’t work – and both are trickier now than they were at the ...”

“... made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David Cameron of his generation, blessed with born-to-the-purple public school assumptions and a casual, unimaginative indifference to the everyday struggles of the masses. Not that there was ever any ‘swank’ about Attlee, but at Oxford between 1901 and 1904 ...”

“... Warburg had a remarkable ability to charm his business guests. In the words of his successor, David Scholey, he was an ‘old actor-manager’ who could turn on a performance as required. He understood that human contact was at the centre of investment banking and took delight in the psychological intricacy of the process. Ferguson provides a fascinating ...”

“... in Northern Ireland did attract a fair bit of attention. A former moderator of the Free Church, David Robertson, wanted to see him in a church court because he had failed to let his faith influence his politics. ‘He is part of our Christian family,’ his local church in Skye announced, ‘and as in all families we will discuss things lovingly and ...”

“... Philosophy’s critics have a variety of criteria from which to choose. The first question to ask about any philosopher’s claims is whether they are true. But there are other questions which sometimes crowd this one out. Is his work accessible and persuasive? Does it touch our lives? Will it last? With so many options there is no pretending that it is obvious what counts as success ...”