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“... All the shops​ on my university campus have gone cashless. The vendors at our farmers’ market use little card readers that plug into their phones. We use cash very little these days and coins even less. By recent historical standards this is an aberration. Since the 1850s and 1860s, when banknotes were standardised in Britain and the United States respectively, most people, most of the time, have thought of money in terms of coins and paper banknotes, marked with numbers to indicate their value in relation to one another and to the goods and services for which they can be exchanged ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... in 1967, Attlee began to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 ...”

“... is always stimulated to an astonishing degree by clever blackguardism’) he hired Lockhart and Wilson, a couple of Scottish lawyers as blackguardly as they were cynical. ‘Wilson was tall, burly, fair-haired, florid-complexioned, gregarious: Lockhart small, dark, atrabilious, conspiratorial.’ What does that sentence ...”

“... at all of what had gone wrong with their little project. Was there a single member of the Wilson Front Bench who could stand up for a second to the icy brilliance of James, a black product of British colonialism who had come back to slay every kind of illusion, including the illusions of black nationalism and Soviet fraternal aid? At the back of the ...”

“... 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 ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison takes issue with Corelli Barnett’s Audit of ...”

“... did not want three simultaneous books about himself. Haines, former press secretary to Sir Harold Wilson, was leader-writer of the Daily Mirror when Maxwell bought it and confidently expected the sack, especially after he had publicly voiced scorn for his new master. Attitudes are quick to be struck and unstruck in Fleet Street. Somehow Haines persuaded ...”

“... sharp cut-off point. What he has to say about Administrations up to 1964 is fresh and fascinating; Wilson’s Administration of 1964-70 was so voluminously covered by press leaks at the time and by endless diaries and memoirs soon afterwards that the official documents have nothing new to tell us, and the Public Record Office is still closed for the ...”

“... owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen Anne’ into ‘Michael Howard didn’t think Norman Stone did enough lecturing’? Nearly every page would have profited from half a dozen footnotes. As it is we’re confronted with sentences such as ‘I have since moved to Vespasiennes & to Gwyn Williams (but am not ...”

“... has been happening. In the first two decades after the war, the cream of the Oxford PPE School (Wilson, Healey, Jenkins, Crossman, Crosland etc) tended to gravitate to the Labour benches, lending the Party an intellectual authority which was crucial to its appeal beyond the traditional working class. Whether or not such men were any good in government, they ...”

“... age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port with ...”

“... to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ungratifying; knowing, too, that my stock of clichés ...”

“... however, Mulhearn scuttled back over the river to Liverpool. His place was filled by Cathy Wilson, who, so it was rumoured, had succeeded in reducing the Labour vote to below the Labour Party membership figure when she contested the Isle of Wight in the 1983 Election. She campaigned on the footing that, being unemployed, she would make a suitable ...”

“... about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of taking the gloves off in the fight with the ‘blackmailing burghers of Brussels and the cheap political opportunists in Dublin’. ‘No surrender’ was the cry of the Apprentice Boys when they shut ...”

“... those along the coast. But ‘nobody can deal with the underlying problems of inner China.’ Michael Bond’s Beyond the Chinese Face is in some ways the perfect foil for Jenner. It is a practical, straightforward pocket guide to social psychology that dissolves the uniqueness of Chinese society. Although it can make sense to talk of ...”