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“... and the decencies were only just maintained. But, with whatever personal misgivings, he recognised Eden as his legitimate successor, just as Eden later forced a smile of approval when Macmillan took over. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a pocket-sized Balfour, emulated him both in deferring to the ...”

“... times, was followed by the worst of times. In February 1950 the couple split up, Reed leaving his Eden (as it would, increasingly, seem to him) for London, where he was to live for the rest of his life, apart from terms as a Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Washington, USA, in 1964, 1965-6, and 1967, and occasional trips to Europe. Perhaps in ...”

“... of how he was outmanoeuvred for this position – in 1956 (not unexpectedly or improperly) by Eden, in 1957 (with great cunning) by Harold Macmillan, and finally in 1963 (almost accidentally) by Alec Douglas-Home – makes fascinating and often distasteful reading. Quite why Rab was pushed aside in this way, and why he ...”

“... Major’s decline rather than his fall. At the time of the Conservative Party Conference, Douglas Hurd warned his party to take heed of the terrible historical precedents of 1846 and 1903 – the two great splits in the Party’s history. From a Conservative point of view this was a pertinent message to deliver, the right thing to say to his ...”

“... the anti-Communist purge and began a vigorous media campaign to end the blacklist. In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered ...”

“... Neville Chamberlain and Churchill. In the second half of the century they were Churchill again, Eden, Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Heath, Thatcher and John Major – a more mixed bunch, admittedly, but still mostly distinguished and competent. That the names of William Hague at the age of 36 and Iain Duncan Smith at ...”

“... a bibulous evening at Number Ten that autumn, when Churchill told his foreign secretary Anthony Eden how to deal with the troublesome Egyptians and other Arabs: ‘Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, “Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews ...”

“... and ruins’ of the Old World before turning, with considerable relief, to establish his Eden in the New. History and mythology are turned against themselves, invoked and then dismissed. Walcott’s many transpositions of Classical and especially Homeric themes from the Aegean to the Antillean satisfy his ‘fever for heroic examples’. Yet they ...”

“... 65 hours’ and she was left ‘badly torn’. They called the baby Gavin after Gavin Douglas, the Scottish medieval poet and translator of the Aeneid, but neither of them was suited to parenting. Willa’s relationship with her own mother was difficult and she avoided contact with her handicapped brother. As a new parent, she kept a journal in ...”

“... got a divorce, and then she was back with Nancy and the Pytchley, and in love with the Hon. Henry Douglas Pennant, a dashing captain in the Grenadier Guards, who embodied all the chivalrous romance she yearned for. Nancy thought him thick, and was determined that he should be swapped for one of the brilliant young men she was meanwhile collecting for weekends ...”

“... David was less restrained. She never seems to have needed the advice she later got from Norman Douglas to do as she pleased ‘and send everybody to hell’, and stepped outside the social pale with barely a backward glance. As a deb, bored by the Season, she was already telling her sister Pris that ‘very soon’ if Mummie isn’t ‘jolly careful ... I ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... of the Flood, a repulsive indication of the partial ruin of the world (there was no sea in Eden, and Revelation promises that there won’t be one after Apocalypse). The shore was where the sea was providentially halted In Classical literature the sea was usually very treacherous, as Horace and Lucretius attest, and of course Odysseus took a long time ...”

“... was a fatal model. Hogg recorded with delight Churchill’s reaction to the receipt of a report by Eden on his tour of the Middle East in 1941: ‘Capital. There are only two clichés you have forgotten: God is love, and Please adjust your dress before leaving.’ The war allowed Churchill to get away with things like this – but Hogg was a peacetime ...”

“... a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re in the middle of a regression which is present in the form of a return to the religious … a rehabilitation of spiritualism.’ Spinozism was part of this: ‘the latest example of ...”