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“... while the title of the new companion, the Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Art, also edited by Harold Osborne, cautiously avoids the issue. Yet 90 per cent of the artists mentioned inside the recent book (although not, of course, 90 per cent of 20th-century artists) are the spiritual progeny of two or three French artists working at the turn of the ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... it’s not all like that. On 16 November 1973, Tynan read a ‘peevish and neurotic attack by John Osborne on Larry, the NT and (especially) me … He calls me a “disastrous influence” and an example of “intellectual spivvery” (a typical late Osborne phrase – vaguely venomous, unsupported by evidence)’. On 6 ...”

“... From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits ...”

“... master’s ear. Things finally came to a head in 2016, when Gove went to see Cameron and George Osborne in Cameron’s Downing Street flat and told them that he was considering siding with the Brexiteers in the forthcoming referendum. He had yet to make up his mind finally but, as he explained, ‘If I do decide to opt for Brexit, I’ll make one ...”

“... partner because he was a homosexual. Berkeley had to deal with the two Cyrils – Black and Osborne – who were the Commons equivalents of Kilmuir and Dilhorne. Black was a Methodist lay preacher; Sir Cyril Osborne, a self-made businessman, informed the Commons that he had been ‘brought up as a Victorian by a very ...”

“... by the miners’ strike. In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took 301 seats on 11.7 million votes, Heath’s Tories got 297 seats on 11.9 million votes, and the Liberals led by Jeremy Thorpe found that their six million votes translated into 14 seats. The Liberals’ mini-revival suggested a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of A Clockwork Orange. The book is crammed with intriguing chunks of information. We learn that Harold Monro, who established the Poetry Bookshop shortly before the First World War, was a twice-married homosexual of Scottish ancestry whose family owned a private lunatic asylum. Of the writers who made their literary debuts in the interwar era, well over a ...”

“... Powell, white with passion, pointed out that ‘Judas was paid. I am making a sacrifice.’ Harold Wilson, a clever judge of such things, felt Benn had been routed by Powell in 1970 and, when the chance of gaining Powell’s support in 1974 emerged, had many private meetings with him in the toilets of the House of Commons. In the end he even adjusted ...”

“... he perceived as a genuine talent.’ Curiously enough, Agate also ‘nurtured the talent’ of Harold Hobson, who was to be the powerful reviewer of the Sunday Times when Tynan was on the Observer. According to James Harding, Hobson unknowingly benefited from Agate’s personal problems. The proprietor of the Sunday Times had heard a story about Agate ...”

“... vulnerable children, elderly people plagued by rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are ...”

“... cent of women were unemployed compared to 3 per cent in Luton; in Lancashire in the late 1950s, Harold Macmillan’s efforts to maintain the price of sterling finally turned cotton into a net import; in the North as a whole from 1979 onwards, inflation and union power were conquered at the cost of industry’s often terminal decline. The preoccupation of ...”

“... pair, failing to make any conclusion of a courtship on a park bench, and it was denounced by John Osborne for being pointless. Days Spent in the Trees was about a greedy, possessive mother doting on her son – but what was Duras driving at? Harold Hobson found an abstract idea in it, the idea of ‘indulgence’, and other ...”

“... once accompanied the ageing queen empress to distribute Christmas presents around the estate at Osborne. Handing over one parcel she told the queen it contained a rug. ‘A rug,’ the queen replied, ‘is something one stands on. It can be called a plaid or a shawl, or even a wrap, but not a rug.’ This monologue continued for some time, while the tenant ...”