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“... Labour campaign against the Common Market, in itself a pejorative term on the left. But Roy Jenkins and others on Labour’s centre-right emphasised reconciliation with former enemies, highlighting in particular the community of purpose with the German Social Democrats, and stressed the importance to the ordinary British worker of trade with Europe. As ...”

“... as well as of the Commonwealth; nor the discernment of the scientist and defence adviser Sir Henry Tizard, who minuted in 1949: ‘We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.’In recent years, that minute has been much quoted, but it ...”

“... the verbal meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ...”

“... letter to the Times, Lords Hailsham, Drogheda, Carrington, Goodman and Weinstock, and Messrs Roy Jenkins and James Prior, said they felt it was a good time, in view of the new publicity about the Ward case, to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century ...”

“... commands in French), and much about the comings and goings of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Prince Charles and the like – plenty of material here for a comparative study of the discourteous and the bibulous, with suggestions of an inverse correlation between the two. At one point in Henderson’s career, however, the role of ambassador ...”

“... Oxford to vote for the chancellor, though it doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of ...”

“... originally consisted of Middlemarch (Virginia Woolf’s nomination), the works of Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, Dickens’s Hard Times and half of Daniel Deronda. The ‘great tradition’ doubtless stands for something much less rigorous in Mr Patten’s mind, but it is nevertheless likely to deny to early adolescents the ...”

“... single passage of her book, she argues that the famous scene in which Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, takes Jean Templer in his arms – in the back of a car, speeding through night and snow along the Great West Road, past the neon sign where a bathing belle ‘dives eternally through the petrol-tainted air’: the opening embrace of the principal ...”

“... politics. At times we can almost hear her repeating Mrs Irving’s fateful question: ‘How long, Henry, are you going on making a fool of yourself?’ The great actor got out of the hansom cab and went his own way, but Harold gave Mary a date and stuck to it. One of the most perspicacious of the book’s chapters is devoted to an examination of leading ...”

“... half delighted and I’m half disdainful – It looks so lovely and it feels so painful. Roy Jenkins will be standing at Hillhead In Glasgow. The world wonders: is this wise? Lose Warrington and it’s a watershed: Defeat there was a victory in disguise. But this time if he doesn’t win he’s dead With all his party sharing his demise. The SDP, awed by ...”

“... compulsions but with its own impulsion. Mrs Trilling turned upon Mailer T.S. Eliot’s praise of Henry James as having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it: ‘Of Mailer we can say that his novelist’s mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology.’ But the greatness of The Executioner’s Song is, surprisingly, in Mailer’s having ...”

“... William, Louis had a claim to the English throne through his wife, Blanche, granddaughter of Henry II). Yet it has been erased from the national memory. Louis’s ‘reign’ might well have lasted longer if John had not conveniently died during the renewed civil war that followed, making a fresh start possible under his nine-year-old son, ...”

“... is a dance to the music of lost time, only more of a quickstep than the stately measure Nicholas Jenkins imagines for Poussin’s Seasons. The music goes round and round, like the wheel, and what Powell suggests, in this light, oblique novel, is not that the dancers are all gone under the hill or show up in strange configurations, but that the dance releases ...”

“... I might be an important person.4 October 1997. Dinner at the country house of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the ...”

“... can lead to retrospective wishful thinking. When I was in Germany last month, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V was showing everywhere, and had clearly caused something of a stir. More than one German asked me whether it should not be seen as part of a long-standing English vision of European unity. I had to confess that I had never before thought of Shakespeare as ...”