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“... nation, rather than Puritan attitudes shared by just a number of the godly. The Reformation, Michael MacDonald maintains in a stimulating introduction to a facsimile reprint of John Sym’s Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing (1637), strengthened and deepened Medieval arguments that suicide, which was seen as prompted by the Devil, was the ...”

“... does seem to be a galloping increase after 1500 or so, but those who have written about it, like Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy in their wonderful Sleepless Souls, have thought it an optical illusion. Murray suggests that this may not be entirely so. One of his ideas is that the Reformation extended religious melancholy from monks to a swathe of ...”

“... settlement in the 17th century, and has been defended in a frontier siege spirit ever since. As Michael MacDonald’s book never tires of pointing out, it is an inherently divisive spirit, incapable of generating consensus. Protestant loyalty is premised upon Catholic disloyalty, Protestant rightness on Catholic wrongness. But ...”

“... Certainly it doesn’t appear in the striking list of words for mad states reproduced in Michael Macdonald’s Mystical Bedlam, a study of 17th-century English sources. Instead we have ‘mad’, ‘lunatic’, ‘melancholy’, ‘stubborn’, ‘suspicious’, ‘fancies and conceits’, ‘frightening dreams’. This disappearance of the ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”

“... a struggle, not only between two power-blocs for the control of the Korean peninsula, as Callum MacDonald bleakly concludes, nor for the vindication of international law, as Max Hastings is still inclined to believe, but for the soul of America: a bitter debate over what kind of super-power the United States was going to be. It is not surprising that so ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... self-made invention or impersonation masquerading as himself.’ Well, it’s certainly true that Macdonald wore the aspect of a large and shaggy animal, not all that good at judging the master’s mood but nonetheless valued and patronised. Perhaps privately longing to be thought fierce or dangerous, he never quite brought off a convincing snarl. Yet he is ...”

“... There is another question on which I am out of line, this time in disagreement with my old friend Michael Foot. Five 20th-century prime ministers and one non-premier (Joseph Chamberlain) have statues in the lobby of the House of Commons: Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Attlee. The inclusion of Joseph Chamberlain seems rather odd unless it be ...”

“... flashbacks over forty years, strange doings between psychiatrists and patients. It is as if Ross Macdonald or Raymond Chandler had gone Gothic, while the principal movement of the fiction remained the same: California tilted into American allegory, skeletons in every designer closet, the glossy present built over a dark and denied past, a handsome house ...”

“... good leaders of the Party since it made its real start at the end of the First World War. Ramsay MacDonald was the first and he ended by making a lamentably false move. Clem Attlee was the second and he was too careful about his moves ever to make a false one. As to the Conservative Party, it stands for nothing beyond a desire to discipline the Trade ...”

“... having missed Leon Trotsky, ‘for I never met a man I didn’t like.’ The young Dwight MacDonald, on the path that would take him from American Trotskyist to mass culture critic, didn’t like Rogers. MacDonald raged at the ‘cheerfully trivial tone’ of his Depression-era movie State Fair, when ‘the American ...”

“... war, for he added: ‘Happily there seems no reason why we should be more than spectators.’ Michael Brock shows with great skill that it was not so much the German invasion of Belgium but the precise nature of that invasion which produced a wide British consensus for war 11 days later. In most cases, then, as ...”

“... The obvious candidate would have been the first man to lead Labour to power, but Ramsay MacDonald put himself beyond the pale: indeed, the psychological wound he left as ‘the lost leader’ was of more lasting significance than anything he achieved in power. Oswald Mosley, the most impressive of the Young Turks to contest ...”

“... in a difficult postwar period. He began this long last lap of life by campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, and the other anti-Coalition candidates, in Lloyd George’s opportunistic general election of December 1918. He opposed the blockade of Germany, the demand for reparations and the hanging of the Kaiser. Most of the candidates he favoured, including ...”