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“... after all, interesting in their own right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of ...”

“... culture of the Scottish Enlightenment which Madison acquired at Princeton from the teaching of John Witherspoon. Professor Garry Wills has now followed Adair and extended his thesis in producing an interpretation of Madison in which the Scottish influence on him has a central place. Wills’s earlier book Inventing America perhaps overstated the case for ...”

“... the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s an ...”

“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ...”

“... in English yet published, unless one counts the excellent but very much shorter piece by Ruth Butler (then Mirolli) in the catalogue of the similar but smaller exhibition held at the J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, in 1971. Poetic sculpture in Victorian England was sometimes reproduced on a reduced scale in parian ware or (especially at the end of the ...”

“... like the mind/body problem. In fact, the climax provides a sort of answer to that conundrum. Harry Butler, adulterous philosophy professor, is about to fall victim to a frame-up by militant lesbians at his university, and is saved professionally by the vigorous intervention of his hitherto merely mystical wife. But the price of his assured future proves to be ...”

“... of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience. I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the ...”

“... Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore ...”

“... remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written ...”

“... met and married Helen Huntington Hooker. She was rich and well-connected; one brother-in-law was John D. Rockefeller III, another the novelist John P. Marquand. As English remarks, the Hooker family, and the conflicts provoked by Helen’s headstrong ways, read like the plot of a Marquand novel. It did not have a happy ...”

“... to Left.’ 4. Nye Bevan called Hugh Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley ...”

“... letters to civil servants, scholars and friends (among them Henry Cole, Edward Fitzgerald and John Forster) demanding access to documents or help with maps for his work on Cromwell. He expected help as his right, and he got it. But he never merged into metropolitan literary and social circles. As Anne Procter noted, in a letter helpfully quoted by the ...”

“... allowed itself to be used to provide publicity for Sothebys, who staged a preview there of Elton John’s collection of bric-à-brac; for the Sock Shop and for Burberrys. ‘We,’ Lord Armstrong told the Lords in defence of these arrangements, ‘are the National Museum of contemporary design. We take pride in having artefacts of contemporary design in ...”

“... of two old people. But as he shows, the relationship was not straightforward. What precisely the butler might have seen remains problematic. It looks as though Balfour vetoed intercourse and obliged Mary to settle for some kind of unspecified ‘fun’: we catch a glimpse of her longing to get away from a concert to smack the great man’s bottom. The sex ...”

“... began to dominate commentary both on the radio and in the papers. Practically alone of his party, John Major reacted positively, grabbing the now-famous soapbox in Luton and thereby returning to his Brixton political roots. This was the signal for an outbreak of patronising journalism by writers who clearly didn’t know what they wanted. There had been ...”