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“... development, enjoyed equal rights of sovereignty and self-determination – the idea that Woodrow Wilson had championed in 1918 – enjoyed, at best, a fragile foothold in world affairs. In the post-war world, however, faith in the capacity of intervention to stabilise international relations became far more difficult to sustain. East-West tensions destroyed ...”

“... hacked about and generally sanitised before becoming the manifesto. The idea, I gather, was that Michael Foot himself was to do the job ... But either he was caught short by Mrs Thatcher’s abrupt decision, or had simply forgotten, or had found it all too much for him; at any event he arrived without anything to show, and the document simply became the ...”

“... who don’t care to go into a question very deeply. The report had been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory Party. In the ...”

“... it. Nobody loved him, whether they accepted his charges – a Russian mole in MI5, the ‘Wilson plot’ – or not. This is understandable. Ministers (like Churchill) resent the betrayal of trust; outsiders are bound to be sceptical. Spies are liars by vocation, certainly if they’re involved in disinformation, as Rimington admits she was. They have ...”

“... true children of the English, and suborning inkehorne changlings in their steade’) and Thomas Wilson, who invented the phrase ‘the King’s English’ in his Arte of Rhetorique (1553), thereby invoking royal sanction for the ‘plainness’ he prescribed. Their campaign inevitably had particular problems with the cultural legacies of the Norman ...”

“... He obviously enjoyed being made much of and he liked a good junket. A trip to Japan with Angus Wilson was particularly rewarding. At one striptease club, as Wilson recorded, ‘when word went round that we were Spender and Wilson – every single person in the place asked for our ...”

“... edifying subtext was supplied last February, in the congressional testimony by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen: ‘Have you ever seen Mr Trump personally threaten people with physical harm?’ ‘No: he would use others.’ ‘He would hire other people to do that?’ ‘I’m not sure he had to hire them, they were already working there. Everybody’s ...”

“... Turner and Constable would have known even the landscapes of their great predecessor Richard Wilson mainly through some wonderful prints by Woollett and others, and at the Academy no fewer than 12 of these are exhibited together, classical landscapes animated by mythological figures, and opposite them some of the great Welsh views including ...”

“... was published fifteen years ago. Aneurin Bevan, Abse said there, was a Freudian case-study; Harold Wilson’s ‘seeming calmness’ a ‘regressive schizoid phenomenon’. The book undoubtedly scored a few (underhand) hits and Anthony Howard called it a ‘revolutionary’ work. In fact, Private Member was pretty modest by comparison with what we have ...”

“... Party and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was ...”

“... fair game. We should also remember that the last Oxford-educated man to lead the Labour Party was Michael Foot and that its last Oxford-educated prime minister was Harold Wilson. About Wilson’s leadership people can differ – I think it was by no means as bad as many have argued ...”

“... totalling eleven hundred pages, a fact which would have undoubtedly pleased their subject. Both Michael Newman’s ‘Political Biography’ and Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman’s ‘A Life on the Left’ rightly insist on their man’s public face. But even his political life was peculiar, if only because this profoundly political man never became a ...”

“... but which have since become available. Substantial biographies of Lawrence by John Mack and Jeremy Wilson, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, have denigrated Aldington’s achievement. Nevertheless he got quite a lot right and it was never again going to be possible to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of derring-do romance. ...”

“... appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”

“... previously misidentified problems sometimes makes his own study more reminiscent of J. Dover Wilson’s What Happens in ‘Hamlet’? (1935). Although Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness contains various disclaimers to the effect that Lewis really does understand that Hamlet is a play (or rather a piece of ‘poetic drama’, which for him usually seems to ...”