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“... allowed a degree of personal expression without attracting suspicions of camp. Watt includes Alan Jenkins’s touching elegy for his father, whom he conjures up through the ties he wore and which Jenkins remembers borrowing down to the last – ‘a sort of crepe he bought for funerals, and hated’. As Breward argues was ...”

“... against the victorious Democrat (and Mason) Andrew Jackson and the National Republicans’ Henry Clay (nominally ‘on the square’, though inactive), but the Anti-Masonic movement would play a central role in the formation of the Whig Party. Several Whig leaders emerged from the movement, including President Harrison, who ran in 1840 as the nominee ...”

“... of the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who ...”

“... the attempt on which William Rodgers and David Owen seem to be embarked, and which has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the Labour ...”

“... of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s Strategy), though seemingly disqualified by his recent published confession that he cannot understand Clausewitz, nevertheless succeeds here, correctly citing the one ...”

“... way through Coleman’s most famous tune, ‘Lonely Woman’. There was a haunting duet between Henry Threadgill, on alto flute, and Jason Moran, on piano, and an electric dialogue between the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the tap dancer Savion Glover. The only alto saxophone heard on Saturday was Coleman’s, glimpsed in a documentary filmed at the 2009 ...”

“... As he says in The Muse of History, he is the great-grandson of the lexicographer James Augustus Henry Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the son and grandson of senior civil servants. This genealogy of scholarly and public service is important to the book, in which questions of kinship and filiation – whether of the blood or ...”

“... husband). In fact she starts a new volume of the diary at the end of July 1916 by claiming that ‘Henry’s position in the country and in the cabinet is stronger than it has ever been.’ Despite or partly because of all her defects, the diaries never cease to entertain, and they turn out to be remarkably enlightening too, if not always in the advertised ...”

“... letters were Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert in their multi-volume Churchill and Roy Jenkins in his Asquith (1964). Their versions were far more accurate than anything that had appeared before, but copyright remained a problem, for Lady Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury) was still alive and was anxious – some would say ...”

“... which laid the foundations of Livingstone’s politics. In this very long autobiography – Roy Jenkins managed Gladstone’s life in less – the most rewarding pages come near the beginning. A politician who believes he can still win power is likely to present himself in the best of lights, or at least suppress any awkward self-knowledge he may happen to ...”

“... faster. Much of the summer holidays of 1958 and 1959 I spent in Norfolk with my schoolfriend Henry Harrod, and we would cycle to the postbox through the cornfields, proudly carrying his father’s letters to Number Ten, adding fuel to the flames. Like Hennessy, my prevailing memory is of those years as tranquil and contented. The harm that our ...”

“... a Dostoevsky novel,’ a place full of ‘the imagination of disaster’ – the phrase comes from Henry James – and not just the imagination, we might add. In this light, Trilling then says, we may feel that Tolstoy ‘gives us, after all, not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality’. This is very intriguing, and a long way – too far, probably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set up for a manifestly political purpose – namely, to add a veneer of judicial legitimacy to a crude ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House ...”