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“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... Labour Government in 1924, along with his brother-in-law, Lord Passfield, better known as Sidney Webb. What with his father’s example, and the intermittent influence of Aunt Bo (as his mother’s sister Beatrice was known), young Stafford had the makings of a hereditary socialist toff – or so it might seem. He resisted his fate, however, and remained ...”

“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... and potentially ennobling pastime. Looking back on her own ‘apprenticeship’, Beatrice Webb recognised its similarity with Margot’s early experience. But Beatrice, coming from a family of comparable size and material comfort, combined greater dedication with a more profound understanding of the problems at stake. To alleviate her personal ...”

“... the reasons for the war or the possibilities of its outcome. Notably, one of them did. To Beatrice Webb the question of who was going to win the current war was immaterial. Her tone was both royal and prophetic; it catered for what might go on beyond the tomb. ‘As we happen to believe in the rightness and eventual success of Soviet Communism, we are not ...”

“... as an ironic shorthand for the futility and mendacity of US policy. Eventually the filmmaker Peter Davis used the phrase as the title for his 1974 documentary which exposed the American invaders’ casual brutality and indifference towards Asian lives. Clinton was involved, however tangentially, in the antiwar counterculture. Yet, like everyone else in ...”

“... years later, she married a future postmaster; they had three children – Basil and Winifred and Peter. She published a few stories in magazines, and was sneered at by her husband’s relatives. In her sixties she wrote three books which made her famous as an articulate inhabitant of that strange planet, the countryside. The books in the trilogy called Lark ...”

“... house. Morris’s own first home, the Red House, at Bexleyheath, designed for him by Philip Webb in 1859, was, Muthesius decided, ‘the first private house of the new artistic culture’. This was an exaggeration which imparted a mythic status to the Red House as a pivotal point in architecture that sometimes hangs about it still. Muthesius was right ...”

“... doctor and contributor to the 1960s counterculture magazine Oz. Others joined in, including Kate Webb, who, when she attended her first RAR meeting, was 17 years old and working in the hat and glove department at Debenhams. Fired up by the way the older campaigners dropped such names as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Alexandra Kollontai and Kurt Weill into the ...”

“... fears about their concern for liberty. In early times socialism was a rationalist creed: Sidney Webb and others dreamt dreams of municipal efficiency and, in the Thirties, the idea of planning inspired the enthusiasm of a generation of intellectuals. Today policy-making consists largely in devising saleable compromises between the ideological imperatives of ...”

“... joyless austerity or as the embodiment of fair-dealing and social equity. On these grounds alone Peter Clarke’s biography is welcome. His is not the first biography of Cripps. Patricia Strauss wrote one in 1942; but it just missed its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the ...”

“... The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship between guide and history. Peter Cunningham had followed his guide to Westminster Abbey of 1842 with a ...”

“... and descends from early historians of the trade-union movement like Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Trade-unionism, on this view, represented the essence of the working-class experience, and an institutional approach to labour history was thus legitimised. The growth of trade-union organisation, and ultimately of the Labour Party, was seen as the ...”

“... gets this wrong). He was clearly highly charismatic, though not everyone fell for him: Beatrice Webb, for example, dismissed him as ‘more than a bit of a poseur’. And the thrilling and colourful exploits depicted in the film are mainly accurate. He possessed character traits that make him even more interesting to biographers, including a very obvious ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”