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“... soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his ...”

“... dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the crisis, the book might look like a hastily-written manifesto for the alliance of born-again social democrats and ancient political re-treads among whom he may be doomed to ...”

“... movement is not likely to seek the ‘overthrow of a government freely elected’. Hugh Jenkins, who was Labour MP for Putney for fifteen years till the 1979 Election, has recorded interviews with twenty of his Labour constituents (among them Hugh Stephenson, Business Editor of the Times, and Labour’s recent convert, ...”

“... these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is significant: Robert Walpole had died in 1745, and a year later his son’s arrested political development brings him back to the quarrels of a previous generation. Many people are liberated by the death of a dominant parent: Horace felt ...”

“... by the suggested disordering of the community, the breaking of certain continuities. Hearth-fires peter out that had been kept alight for more than a hundred years. Crofter children start looking to the towns or even the mainland for their employment. It’s the usual story of restlessness overtaking the young. ‘There were more deaths than births in the ...”

“... an arch with a kink at one end like a giant dog ball thrower, is, according to its designer Peter Jenkins, the first of its kind in the world. ‘I’d like to think that George Stephenson would have approached the challenge in a similar manner, laying the new railway infrastructure over the old,’ he told the Manchester Evening News. Even the ...”

“... in Bavaria. In his spare time he writes rap poems featuring an invented character called Greenbo Jenkins: part saint, part thug, part corporate slave, who refers to Liam Green in the third person. I stayed at his flat in a boxy suburb. ‘Why Munich?’ I asked. His parents had moved on, as expats do: there was no family to tie him here. ‘Because the ...”

“... of Fleet Street than to the battle-lines of politics. In her view, demobilisation loomed. Roy Jenkins is capable of generous and spontaneous gestures: he once gave Harold a gramophone record of Asquith making a political speech. To give a present like that, she notes, is true generosity. She quotes a colleague as saying ‘that the only thing Roy has ever ...”

“... be reminded in passing that in 1945 the Conservatives still held five of the 15 Glasgow seats: Roy Jenkins toppled the last of these when he won Hillhead.)Unquestionably, however, the most resonant items concern women – who, significantly, came by the end of the war to dominate Mass Observation’s panel of observers. There is a shrewd account by a highly ...”

“... who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as Peter Carey ends his new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a ...”

“... half delighted and I’m half disdainful – It looks so lovely and it feels so painful. Roy Jenkins will be standing at Hillhead In Glasgow. The world wonders: is this wise? Lose Warrington and it’s a watershed: Defeat there was a victory in disguise. But this time if he doesn’t win he’s dead With all his party sharing his demise. The SDP, awed by ...”

“... of Oscar Wilde’, the model for the flamboyant Mr Deacon? Probably. Is there a touch of Peter Quennell in the floppy-haired Mark Members? Is J.G. Quiggin really Cyril Connolly? And is Moreland Constant Lambert? Is Dr Trelawney ‘a projection’ of Aleister Crowley? Was Adrian Daintrey Zouch? Is Bagshaw Malcolm Muggeridge? Was Julian Maclaren-Ross ...”

“... and Devonshires’: ‘there was a great uproar and lots of four-letter words; Debo said to Roy Jenkins: “Can’t you stop them by saying something Labour?” ’ – ‘but this,’ she says to Waugh, ‘is something Roy has never been able to do.’ There’s an interest, of course, in all this tribal chit-chat, but however stylishly done, it doesn’t ...”

“... as in Eisenhower’s America, but dull nonetheless, not to mention smug. It is not surprising that Peter Hennessy should call his monumental history Having It So Good, nor that Dominic Sandbrook should call his equally monumental recent history of the late 1950s and early 1960s Never Had It So Good. This neatly illustrates the drawback of ...”

“... Thomas’s, Larkin’s influence was huge; unlike Dylan Thomas’s, it persists in what Nigel Jenkins has memorably called ‘the routine shibboleths of subject-matter, imagist verisimilitude, experience-fixated “creative writing”, secular common sense and “unique voice” fetishism’. One thing the date-of-birth ordering of these anthologies ...”