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“... and growing trade unions. But there was nothing new about that either. The Unions had seen off the Wilson government in 1969 when it had moved to reform them, and thereby helped to bring it down in the election of the following year. The Heath and the Callaghan governments suffered similar fates in 1974 and 1979. What, perhaps, did happen during the Seventies ...”

“... 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 celebrate its rebuilding. Brave Enterprise was written by the theatre’s publicist, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, who had moved to Stratford in 1925, after being appointed drama critic of the Stratford Herald on the recommendation of his famous second cousin, G.K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 in South Africa, where his father supervised a gold mine, A.K. had ...”

“... Attlee volunteered for active service. With commendable restraint in a very full and rich book, Kenneth Harris passes quickly over Attlee’s distinguished war service in the Dardanelles, which took him to the rank of major. At the war’s end, Attlee achieved considerable local prominence as both prospective Parliamentary candidate for Limehouse and, in ...”

“... Hundred and One Damnations demonstrated? In a racy account of the Alliance election campaign Des Wilson gives an excellent sense of what it must be like to be a hyperactive member of the crew of a plane which refuses to take off, waiting for the surge which never comes. The final section of his book, which is an election diary, has the merit of ...”

“... risked his life on behalf of his country (Clem Attlee was another). Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson didn’t. It isn’t quite clear what Owen means to conclude from this peculiar passage. But most intelligent readers would assume that he is saying that we ought to be much more belligerent in our foreign policy because that is the way working people ...”

“... you can attack a man’s politics without losing his personal friendship?’ Similarly with Harold Wilson, a most carefully cultivated contact. Junor wrote some genuinely rough stuff about Wilson, including one sally lovingly preserved here: ‘All I ever doubted was whether between his backstud and his backside there was ...”

“... of entertainment to have been written in modern times, comparable in its passion and panache to Kenneth Tynan’s theatre reviews in the post-war period, but without the golly-goshery that mars Tynan’s work. It seems likely to last as long as anyone cares about words rising to the challenge of such images. One of the central tenets of James’s TV ...”

“... himself later judged the best thing said at the time. When the blast subsided, the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and declared: ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’ In general, however, the test was a rhetorical dud. After the physicist Samuel Allison had counted off ‘two, one, zero, NOW,’ a general ...”

“... Some time in the late 1960s the then prime minister Harold Wilson started using a new phrase to describe the world we live in: ‘pluralist democracy’. The word ‘pluralist’, which had been hanging around for a long time without doing any harm to anyone, meant, I think, ‘accepting many interests and ideas, rather than one ...”

“... and connubium. In Western societies they have operated within the cultural framework of class. Kenneth Ballhatchet takes the equally familiar notion that in colonial societies alien minority rule translated class distinctions into those of race. In India he sees the social aloofness of the ruling white minority as being reinforced during the 19th century ...”

“... Britain duly puts in a guest-appearance: Mrs Thatcher. The Ironised Maiden is in evidence, too, in Kenneth Baker’s anthology of verse parodies, Unauthorised Versions. But then Mr Baker is a Conservative politician, mainstream, main chance. Politically these are authorised versions. One of the entries, by Roger Woddis, sings of ‘The Church of ...”

“... of villains, you must remember that their originals are the even less plausible-sounding Sante, Kenneth and Kenny Kimes. If you think it a bit much to have them arrested on slavery charges and then carrying on as if nothing has happened, or to have their scams involve Gerald Ford and Pat Nixon, or to have the man who sells them illegal guns explain how to ...”

“... forgive for conjuring Lord Home out of a hat in 1963. Also striking is his dislike of Harold Wilson, who is, broadly speaking, depicted as having debauched British politics by an almost singular lack of principle. Indeed, in his account, not the least benign consequence of a Tory victory in 1964 is that the British people would have been spared Harold ...”

“... of Glazebrook, he chose to represent him with Hollis’s 1970 catalogue in his lap. Christopher Wilson’s excellent Richard Hollis Designs for the Whitechapel, the final book from Hyphen Press, is not only a detailed analysis of the work of Hollis, with whom Wilson collaborated from 1999 to 2004, but a story of aesthetic ...”