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“... Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper should be an independent ...”

“... of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel Trilling wrote fiction, Harold Rosenberg wrote poetry, Alfred Kazin wrote his memoirs. They weren’t just critics: they were writers. With the rise of mass education after World War Two, the demand for English professors grew, more university presses were established, and increasing ...”

“... but the ranks of inscribed black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of ...”

“... saw it in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the original four?’I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: ‘Were you one of the original twelve?’Does the Holy Ghost resent God the Father and God the Son being better known (and certainly more ...”

“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”

“... to support his scepticism at his home institution in the so-called École de Yale. In 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, all at the time Yale colleagues, put together a kind of manifesto entitled Deconstruction and Criticism. There were certain affinities among the five but the differences were more ...”

“... He complained about his tutors at Oxford. He complained with special vehemence when his uncle Harold, the first Lord Rothermere (Lord Northcliffe had died in 1922, the year King graduated), declined to give him the important job in newspapers that he felt was his due. Instead Rothermere sent him to Scotland to learn the ropes on the Glasgow Record and the ...”

“... you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the ...”

“... is Last Word, the obituary programme on Radio 4, and The Archive Hour, which on 7 July was about Harold Macmillan – the Night of the Long Knives. This was terrific stuff both in itself, Macmillan always a treat even when he’s being a showman, but also in pointing up the driving down of standards in politics that has occurred since. Taken together with ...”

“... circulation declined, notwithstanding its 1964 relaunch as the Sun, complete with the new Wilson-era slogan: ‘Born of the age we live in!’ When IPC finally decided to sell the Sun the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am ...”

“... the watchword. Or as the historian Ranajit Guha called it, ‘dominance without hegemony’. Jon Wilson’s India Conquered could be described as a rewriting of Guha from a British viewpoint. Or you could call it a history of aloofness. From the start, the British saw themselves, in another pithy phrase of Guha’s, as ‘an absolute externality’ to Indian ...”

“... of them protected the writers and actors from the BBC hierarchy. John Bird used to do a very good Harold Wilson and after one show Ned was summoned by Hugh Carleton-Greene, the director-general, and told that the prime minister was threatening legal action. ‘Tell him to go ahead,’ said Ned. ‘Say that just because he’s prime minister he ...”

“... not trust him and with whom he wants to settle accounts, the most prominent two – Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and Senior Policy Adviser George Stephanopoulos – have since departed the scene. Ickes was fired in humiliating circumstances after years of canine loyalty, and Stephanopoulos had had enough for other reasons. But neither man received any ...”

“... on you. Cimmie: Went to lunch at Maryland today, found Princess Louise, Lady Londesburgh, Jack Wilson ... I tried desperately hard to be friendly and gay. It was the fashion in the Mosleys’ circle for husbands to try to get off with other people’s wives: this was another of the ‘rules of the game’ to which Nicholas Mosley’s title refers. But if ...”

“... on, but never made themselves known to her. The person who may have seen Betty most often was Harold Blanchard – one of Hilda’s brothers – whose job it was to deliver bread door to door in Chapel, arriving in a cream-coloured baker’s van. Betty always wondered why Mr Blanchard called with loaves at all the houses in their street, except ...”