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“... well-loved pool,/By Fox’s Dingle’. The shop didn’t thrive: Graves claimed that he ran it on Robin Hood principles, overcharging the wealthy literati of Boars Hill in order to subsidise the poorer inhabitants of neighbouring Wootton. When it went bust Graves and Nancy lost £300 they did not have. Graves’s mother, who came from the wealthy German von ...”

“... and ‘unenterprising’ scholars will find a happy home. Many of these issues are taken up in Robin Alston’s inaugural lecture as professor in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at UCL.* Alston, although adept in new technology, is sceptical about the utopianism which underlies the BL’s strategic thinking. He believes that the ...”

“... it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable ...”

“... versus Lawrence Stone, R.H. Tawney, Rodney Hilton, George Homans, Christopher Hill, C.H. Wilson, C.B. Macpherson (and long-dead greats such as Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies) is his answer to the question of why fully-fledged industrial capitalism first took off in England. This has usually been thought to be the same question as ...”

“... on bass, but the first thing we hear is the lugubriously reassuring voice of the producer, Tom Wilson, announcing ‘“Dime Store” – Take 1’. This is one of a number of unfamiliar early titles, for these are songs still in the making. Thus ‘She Belongs to Me’ is first slated as ‘My Girl’ and later as ‘Worse than Money’; and Highway ...”

“... playing Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken place six months before, and the advent of the SNP had kicked Scottish politics into life. It was a talking rather than a dancing party, and the politics themselves seemed intoxicating enough. Around two we processed ...”

“... converts. But the cries of disappointment and betrayal, the denunciations of the media, Harold Wilson and the IMF, and the assumption that the answerability of Parliamentary representatives of the Left to a party executive dominated by constituency and trade-union militants is truly ‘democratic’, are not likely to persuade anyone not persuaded ...”

“... exploiting well-worn anecdotes. Moorcock sketches his version of the late Derek Raymond (a.k.a. Robin Cook) as a Soho revenant: ‘Cookie was still alive in those days . . . and telling your stories back to you faster than you could recount them.’ Much of King of the City is like that, using the ‘twist’ to reconstitute chat rehearsed by Moorcock in ...”

“... back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his ...”

“... item of dress. Heath at least deserves the credit for initiating the Think Tank. Even Harold Wilson, after some initial misgivings about an institution inherited from his predecessor, found some constructive work for it to do. For the Think Tank members, James Callaghan emerges as the premier for whom it was easiest to work because he never pretended to ...”

“... may be remembered as one of the most distinguished and ambitious products of this upsurge. Colin Wilson and Arthur Koestler should look to their laurels. At the Florence conference contributors showed how the Renaissance revival could be seen as a ‘discovery’ of active popular culture by the ruling class – and also as a manipulation of that culture for ...”

“... son and his friend to the cinema when she was called into the Commons to deputise for her boss, Robin Cook, who was stuck in Edinburgh. She says it would have been easy enough to change her plans, but ‘my maternal self-esteem, precarious at the best of times, would have collapsed altogether if I turned into one of those parents who let their children down ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the ...”

“... of Kon Fredericks and Ralph Cooper (the plumber Sir Peter tried so hard to sack) and we think of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck; we cast their boss as the Sheriff of Nottingham, frustrated by merry men. Sir Peter’s diary shows him trying to persuade softer members of the staff to join Nattke in order to outvote the happy band of brothers; another tactic was to ...”

“... But they operate in a void. There is nothing else in the books. This was in the mind of Edmund Wilson when he wrote the formidable essay called ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ We can say only that, within the limitations of her craft, Agatha Christie can, at need, write with a verbal adroitness far exceeding anything that has gone before ...”