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“... The 1060-seater Broadway, which opened in April 1935, was more upmarket. Designed by Alister MacDonald, son of Ramsay, it had pink and yellow carpets and ceiling vents decorated with gold camels. Between the wars, Glasgow had the largest number of cinema seats per capita in Europe. The Broadway’s first manager, W.V. Gillgan, fed the hunger for escape ...”

“... Barlinnie. Michael’s mother was born in Glasgow, but her people came from Belfast. His father, Hugh O’Hagan, trained as an iron-worker and lived on the road where St Mary’s Chapel stood, Abercrombie Street, number 112. Hugh died of bronchitis at his work in 1932: he’d been working as a night watchman with the ...”

“... Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative biographies of Torquemada and Cesare Borgia. He ...”

“... and worked as a ‘herring girl’, gutting fish with her hacked, salt-smarting hands. Murdo Macdonald, who shared a primary school desk with Iain at Bayble Public School in the Point district of Lewis, remembers the small boy as humorous but extremely shy. He read and imitated Keats, Scott and Shelley, won a scholarship to the Nicolson Institute in ...”

“... As for trusting one’s memory unaided: I was rung up some years ago by a researcher working on Hugh Dalton’s diaries to ask if I was the young person referred to in Dalton’s account of a Sunday lunch party at Harry Walston’s house at Newton in the early Fifties. Oh yes, I said brightly, and prattled on for several minutes about the pink ...”

“... years. Success eluded him during his lifetime, although some prescient fellow writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid and H.G. Wells, had marked him as a major talent. Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless North-Eastern coastal region that separates St Andrews from Aberdeen. The ...”

“... people’ – and by an unruly Kynd Kittock’s Land of howffs and good cracks captured in Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Drunk Man’ and kept up by the late great John Smith in the saloon of the Night Scotsman. A middle class which in the South went Thatcherite and cocooned itself in a Sunday Times lifestyle tended in Scotland to stay Labour or ...”

“... remained obscure right up to his death. The man who wrote the preface to the first volume of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, and also told the Commons in 1932 – much to his own party’s embarrassment – that if the Scots wanted home rule they should have it, fits into no Clubland category. If Buchan’s identity was veiled in the Sixties, ‘Our ...”

“... the name not of Labour’s most self-consciously Keynesian Chancellor, but that of his successor, Hugh Gaitskell. Clarke makes clear just what an odd fish Cripps must have seemed: That [by 1939] he should have become a left-wing socialist was a paradox. That he should have become a teetotaller . . . likewise jarred with convention. That he should have adopted ...”

“... to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of ...”

“... two elections and lasted three years. Again he flirted with the Liberals but he also flirted with MacDonald and when, at the beginning of 1924, MacDonald was in a position to form a government Mosley applied to join his party. The decision wasn’t merely cynical, though there were plenty of people around at the time to say ...”

“... often found it difficult to believe that he could be Labour leader, let alone prime minister. Hugh Dalton called him ‘a little mouse’, and Herbert Morrison endlessly intrigued to displace him. As for Attlee himself, he was always extremely modest about his talents. Of the times he was forced to stand in for Churchill during the war he would ...”

“... to his programmatic radicalism. One other figure who flits through this early period is Ramsay MacDonald, already dreaming of being prime minister while running a ‘Fellowship House’ in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. Ellis left London for a medical practice in Blackburn in 1887, and managed to survive the death of his mother (she died as he was reading ...”

“... Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay MacDonald’s ill-fated Cabinet to argue against dole cuts in 1931. Michael died as the brave new postwar world of the UN and the welfare state was taking shape. The diaries also record Benn’s obsessive love affair with the square mile of Westminster (‘my ...”

“... the confidence of prime ministers. He was in the private sitting room of Number Ten when Ramsay MacDonald returned from the palace on resigning. He belonged to Chamberlain’s magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the ...”