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“... and he and his supporters had been cast into outer darkness. Then the pendulum swung again. Harold Wilson, now back in office, sought, after a period of mainly bogus ‘renegotiation’, endorsement in a referendum of Britain’s continued membership of the European Community. Roy Jenkins led the all-party ‘Britain in Europe’ campaign, and achieved what he ...”

“... of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it. When the Tories are in office, all those bankers and businessmen and judges are their friends. There’s no need or inclination to blow them off course. Then suddenly comes Norman Lamont’s shock claim, greeted by prolonged and fervent ...”

“... Forty-one years after F.O. Matthiessen’s suicide, and 44 after his big book The James Family: A Group Biography, here is R.W.B. Lewis, Matthiessen’s pupil at Harvard, with one on the same subject, nearly as big. Its very title twists a touch awkwardly to avoid repeating that of its precursor, to which Lewis acknowledges a large debt ...”

“... geriatrics (the only remarkable book about the elderly that immediately comes to mind is Angus Wilson’s marvellous and still not widely enough known Late Call): so one admires Ms Lamming’s decision to build her story round a half-senile widower, Arnold Lawson, who has just moved into a new district and is exciting the curiosity of the local newspaper ...”

“... Mask album (1982) from Lou Reed, a student of Schwartz’s at Syracuse in the early Sixties. And James Atlas’s sensitive biography, published in 1977, provides an exhilarating mass of circumstantial evidence about Schwartz’s day-to-day existence. But the best introduction to his achievement remains his extraordinary first book. He really was onto ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... me long before I heard of him.’ The guiding principle of the philosophical approach William James defined as ‘pragmatism’ was that ideas and beliefs are not inherently true, or right, but are made so by their practical consequences. For James, this meant that religious belief could retain its validity in an age of ...”

“... to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait. Big Jim is vividly told and convincingly three-dimensional. And it isn’t always in very good taste. Yet despite ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... another’s way!’ In the 1960s Warburg found a less unsuitable focus for his attention in Harold Wilson, having been attracted by the sweep-away-the-cobwebs tone of Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ speech. Anti-semitism, inevitably, was another reason Warburg felt himself to be an outsider. During his early years ...”

“... tackle a subject variously seen as gallant paladin, pathological liar and career oddity? Mr James, in this sensible, not too long life, answers with as much moderation and dispassion as can be asked for. He strikes no pose: Arabist, Zionist, Regular Army, anti-Army, Lawrentian or anti-Lawrentian. The book is a steady climb by the South Coll, rather ...”

“... but what Vidal has to offer might have been more accurately if less enticingly labelled Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Hollywood fits rather curiously into Vidal’s saga of American political history. Chronologically it is the sequel to Empire (1987) but also the predecessor of Washington DC, the novel set in the 1940s with which Vidal started the ...”

“... matters.* The widespread impression that the book is mainly about MI5 attempts to destabilise the Wilson Government is quite wrong – there are just a few pages about this. Most of the book is an account of the endless mole-hunting undertaken in the aftermath of the Burgess/ Maclean/ Philby affairs and the construction of Wright’s case that the MI5 ...”

“... of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...”

“... information about individuals was recovered with a view, it is now admitted, to discovering Mr Wilson’s sources, therefore it represents an interference with his Article 10 rights as a journalist … There is a real risk that conduct of that sort will have a chilling effect on his ability to obtain and disseminate information in the public ...”