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“... was the real Karl. Right now, columnist, game-show pundit and biographer of Tom Driberg, Francis Wheen is here to tell us that all the previous practitioners and theoreticians of Marx’s work – both the governments and the academics (in economics, history, geography, sociology, literature) who professed themselves Marxists – have ...”

“... and combative portrait with background (to annex Tom’s own title for his profile of Guy Burgess) Francis Wheen doesn’t consider the social-democratic aspect of oral and homosexual promiscuity as much as he does the allegedly crypto-Communist angle that has lately been superimposed upon it. A whole flock of mediocre scavangers, from Chapman Pincher to ...”

“... sort of thing that I can think of is Posy Simmonds’s Gemma Bovery – her impartial colleague Francis Wheen suggested it should have won the Booker Prize. All of which would seem to suggest that it’s fine to do it as long as you do it with some other country’s literature. The infiltration of ex-KGB mafiosi, envoys from the Russia of Metelitsa’s ...”

“... Hunt clearly thinks so. He has restored colour, lights and action to Engels’s life much as Francis Wheen did in his makeover of Marx ten years ago. The Frock-Coated Communist is highly readable and mostly reliable. Engels’s previous biographers – principally Gustav Mayer (who knew his contemporaries) and Terrell Carver – were unable to ...”

“... Got News for You and The News Quiz respectively, Ian Hislop (Ardingly, Magdalen) and old Harrovian Francis Wheen tirelessly carry on the work that the Beyond the Fringe team started more than half a century ago.When Have I Got News for You moved to BBC One more than a decade ago it began to lose some of its teeth: so much so, after a while, that one ...”

“... that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century. Jacques Attali’s book is ...”

“... its heroine from babyhood through convent to civil rights marches. The unfamiliar words are few (wheen, wain, sheoghe – the last, ‘changeling’, beautifully applied to the narrator’s father on his release from a long jail sentence), so that by the end the phonetic oddities are scarcely noticeable. This might not have pleased MacDiarmid, who would have ...”