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“... At first sight​ , a new life of Ellen Wilkinson appears to offer readers a return to ‘old Labour’ principles, as articulated and put into practice by one of the party’s most famous women leaders. Wilkinson came from the north, represented the shipyards of Jarrow and always spoke for the workers ...”

“... 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the ...”

“... of its morally reprehensible outcomes – for example, the kinds of outcome recently described in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level – it surely makes a difference whether those outcomes are produced by base motives or systemic imperatives.* This isn’t just a matter of the old philosophical conundrum about whether ...”

“... efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were heavily influenced by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level, with its strange subtitle, ‘Why Equality Is Better for Everyone’. Its underlying assumption was that inequality could only be tackled by an appeal to the rationality and self-interest of those ...”

“... had a sideline as a set designer. Perhaps Egyptology equips people to create illusions. If Toby Wilkinson’s new book, A World beneath the Sands, is anything to go by, some Egyptologists operate under quite a large one: that the history of their field is something to celebrate rather than scrutinise. The drama plays out against palm trees, pyramids and ...”

“... other landmarks which have bubbled up on the London horizon in recent years. The architects, Wilkinson Eyre, designed the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (also curvy) and are now working on, among other things, the King’s Waterfront Centre in Liverpool. A recent exhibition in a blacked out subterranean space at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station at ...”

“... making a number of smoothly-meshing points around central images – crusade, change, the future. Richard Nixon, for his part, was apt to jump from dignity to folksiness, as if the strain of keeping up a high tone was too much. The most deviant of the post-war acceptance speeches was Harry Truman’s in 1948. Today, if you read the speech rather than ...”

“... on the evening before the Commons debate. In the words of the independently minded Conservative Richard Shepherd, all we ‘knew about the Bill was what I believe the country will come to detest more than anything – the manipulation, the spin, the press releases and all the covert ways of trying to secure the legislation of this country without reference ...”

“... more enclosed than they take themselves to be. Several of the writers here – Drew Milne, John Wilkinson and Caroline Bergvall, for example – opt understandably for a poetic strategy that allows no rest at all but the results are oddly stable. A delirious quest for the inconceivable seems to inform the work of John ...”

“... All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés played Johann Strauss waltzes all the time. Everyone was analysed by Freud, but it didn’t make any difference. They were very rich and they had terrific furniture. Many of them were waiting for a bit part in La ...”

“... as was only appropriate for ‘this age of improvement’. In 1868 the popular language columnist Richard White rejected a reader’s suggestion of en, from French (surprisingly not the more apt on), the virtues of which the reader had illustrated with the sentence ‘If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn’t eat cheese for supper.’ White, who favoured the ...”

“... In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand ...”

“... the streets, while others were forcibly sent to psychiatric hospitals. The regime was relentless. Richard Bosworth’s family saga focuses on the two most famous Amendolas – Giovanni and Giorgio, who became a high-ranking communist, a leading figure on the left in both fascist and democratic Italy. Giorgio later claimed that he first understood ‘hard and ...”

“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A lot of ...”

“... were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square ...”