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“... the years, his list of suspects in the West became more and more outrageous. They included Harold Wilson, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Lester Pearson and Henry Kissinger. They also included every Soviet defector who had come after him. These men had been sent, Golitsyn said, to discredit him because the KGB knew how dangerous he ...”

“... would be pretty much sealed. We would enter the scenario predicted – with some relish – by Tom Nairn, the sage of Scottish political prophecy: ‘Any day now the wolves will break into the drawing room – and it’ll not be the cucumber sandwiches they’re after!’ But that seems unlikely. Assuming the wolves are still some way off, might not a ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”

“... supervillain of Scottish history. As he writes, the rot started before she took office, but where Wilson, Callaghan and even Heath sought to manage the decline of Britain’s traditional industries, Thatcher removed the state from the equation, except when deploying its enforcers to put down ‘the last great action of the mineworkers’. Lloyd offers a ...”

“... There is more vim and traction in later missives to the Scottish poets Robert Crawford and Rab Wilson, written in the six-line, tightly rhymed stanzas known as standard Habbie. ‘Surprising by their fine excesses,’ he says of Burns, in another echo of Keats’s letters, ‘Like bottled stuff that effervesces,/The lines fly past like fast ...”

“... dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of particular historical conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of ...”

“... which has somehow got out of hand . . . A poverty of invention which is almost pathetic,’ Edmund Wilson wrote in 1956. ‘A combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh,’ the poet John Heath-Stubbs joshed at around the same time. ‘My nightmare,’ added Germaine Greer.The quite funny one-liners abound, but it’s much harder to find someone writing sensibly ...”

“... seems not to be powerful. I hope this can be said without being taken as part of some (Tom) Pauline conspiracy of Irish bull merchants. It is not at first sight a ‘political’ problem, since one of the things that Dodsworth manages to do, very well, is to bring class and class questions back into Hamlet criticism. The play’s leading characters ...”

“... Swinging Sixties in London but also with the techie progressivism of the Labour Party under Harold Wilson. This imperative led Banham to his first polemic against Pevsner et al’s rationalist reading of Modernist architecture, which was doxa by the time Theory and Design in the First Machine Age appeared. According to Banham, the architects elevated to ...”

“... having made great work by such inartistic means. One is the naive artist: the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson reputedly arranged his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, by sitting all day with a small orchestra and singing each instrumentalist his part. He’d have the ensemble perform, then he’d make alterations, listen again, and so forth, until the arrangement matched ...”

“... myself out to be pleasant, to which he barked amiably. Monday 18 June 1956: I’ve just finished Tom Driberg’s life of Max Beaverbrook ... the Duke of Windsor virtually half-witted from first to last (no surprise to me). Monday 19 January 1959: The Windsors’ party was very gay. She certainly is a most charming hostess and he was extremely amiable. The ...”

“... on standards in public life, a member of the Commission, MacGregor’s former cabinet colleague Tom King, signalled his approach to MacGregor’s conduct with the memorable sentence: ‘I will embarrass you now by saying I always thought you should be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ MacGregor’s antics were governed by the prevailing Parliamentary ethic ...”

“... that ‘for Gore and the other populists, the imperialism of the two Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson – Polk, too, earlier – was a terrible distraction from our destiny, which was the perfection of our own unusual if not, in the end, particularly “exceptional” society.’ The let-down at the end of that sentence is one that I wish he would ...”

“... I have seen the word used recently in pieces about Sonic Youth, the reformed Sleater-Kinney, Tom Petty and Madonna, among others. Phillips found a perfect vehicle for self-starter activism in a music that many might assume was still quintessentially pale and male and terminally insular. As if on cue, here is Solange, talking about A Seat at the Table on ...”

“... of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elzheimer, Rembrandt, and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of map-work. Fuseli did introduce a small saving clause in defence of painters of ‘Views’: their ‘enumerations’ of the objects in a scene become ‘little more than topography’ only if they are not ‘assisted ...”