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“... for someone to blame, so they blamed the president.In that year’s presidential election Woodrow Wilson lost the state of New Jersey, where he had once been governor. The biggest swings against him came in the counties nearest the shore, where the switch of allegiance was comparable to the turn against Herbert Hoover at the nadir of the Great Depression. In ...”

“... at Leamington, Scott fought against it. Eventually the builder had to write: ‘The Revd C.C. Wilson wishes to have a Bath. I told him what you said but he decided to have one.’ Later, Scott condemned church benches with backs as tokens of ‘advancing effeminacy’. For his handful of houses, many of them like the one at Leamington for wealthy ...”

“... of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference that the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even ...”

“... with the traditional values of Labour in office. Its ‘moderate’ and accommodating leader, Andrew McIntosh, was kicked out and replaced by the candidate of the left wing, Ken Livingstone. The times were bad for the Thatcher Government – one of the few really bad periods it has had. The economy was going through its deepest slump since the ...”

“... denies any particular bias against Labour governments, and is sorry to have fallen out with Harold Wilson (who later expressed sadness that he hadn’t known Pincher was a fellow Yorkshireman, telling him: ‘It would have made a difference, you know’). But while it may be true that he needled Tory as well as Labour administrations, provoking Harold ...”

“... and loathing, which is chiefly a warped form of embarrassment about one’s former admiration. Andrew Biswell’s new biography, which generously allows Burgess’s friends and enemies to speak in their own voices, flushes out the worst aspects of Lewis. It presents Burgess’s life with a sobriety and care that are at once admirable and slightly ...”

“... the complaint, we are told that the suburb attracted the pragmatic end of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, Manny Shinwell and Peter Mandelson’s mother, Mary, while Hampstead proper attracted ‘more self-consciously intellectual’ politicians such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and Michael Foot. Here is unmasked the latent snobbery of the ...”

“... and have close parallels in the work of more prosaic Glaswegian architects, such as Charles Wilson, whose Free Church College of 1855-7 also features a portico raised above a high base and highlighted by towers. What distinguishes Thomson from even his most talented contemporaries, such as John Burnet Sr, or the Gothically inclined J.J. Stevenson, is ...”

“... then sharp, then finally embittered exchanges which he had over almost twenty years with Edmund Wilson: an epistolary novel in which a friendship shrank and died in the space separating two bad-tempered writers who could not agree politically about the Soviet Union nor find common ground over the rules of Russian and English metrics. There is an occasional ...”

“... the ‘Jazz Age’ while paying the Fitzgeralds’ bills for a decade; the friendships with Edmund Wilson, Ring Lardner, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and above all with Hemingway; the insanity that crippled Zelda during the Thirties, and the alcoholism that devastated Scott; the prolonged composition and demoralising failure of Tender is the night; Zelda’s ...”

“... popular films featuring notable individual male characters as Goodbye, Mr Chips, Citizen Kane, Wilson, Casablanca and Henry V.’ This is ‘coverage’, and we feel that his heart is not quite in it. It would appear that, when writing about his war, Fussell finds it difficult to spread himself around. As he once testified, he is ‘really a pissed-off ...”

“... and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe sticks out of his sock. The Guardian compilation reminds readers how high expectations were when Brown took over. ‘Master ...”

“... we arrived at the studio until the moment we left. She didn’t use a tape recorder. (Edmund Wilson said she was ‘the girl with a tape recorder in her head’.) We watched the live recording from Lorne Michaels’s office, and she went in and out of people’s dressing rooms and availed herself of the catering, but there were no interviews, and she ...”

“... beer-swiller is not a figure to appeal to the poet’s most recent biographer, the novelist A.N. Wilson, whose Milton is the solitary, although not the sour, figure of tradition. Impatient of other people’s unfounded speculations, Wilson has awarded himself a generous novelist’s licence; and he writes with an hauteur ...”

“... Field has evidently been forbidden to quote from Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), thus fatally impoverishing his account of the author’s most important literary relationship. (Karlinsky, incidentally, has his little say about Field’s ‘enormous blunders’ in the preface to his volume.) Not to put too fine a point ...”