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“... But some historians were so overwhelmed by Hexter’s brusque knockdown arguments that, as Laura Stevenson O’Connell puts it in this volume, ‘in the years following [Hexter’s] attack on the “myth of the middle class” ’ they dropped the phrase, ‘constructing instead new models of the Tudor social hierarchy that omitted the middle class ...”

“... For another, the older and cleverer phrase – limousine liberal – had gone out with Adlai Stevenson and needed a retread. To take up Radical Chic now (excerpted in this volume) and to turn its pages is to undergo a disturbing experience compounded of déjà vu and disappointment. Was there really a time when Park Avenue bled for the American black ...”

“... We won’t find, for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... day when O’Brien and his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Raphael, watched their mutual friend Adlai Stevenson trudge through a mendacious speech about that same Bay of Pigs. He knew he was lying, they knew he was lying, he knew they knew that he knew. As a consequence, he would sometimes lift his eyes to where they sat, as if in mute appeal for them to realise ...”

“... traces the change from her initial Victorian view of art as masculine – she keenly admired Stevenson and Kipling – and her scorn of ‘lady writers’ who she believed ‘lacked discipline, shaping intelligence and craft’, to her later recognition that female artistry was feasible. She saw the possibility first in great singers and actresses ...”

“... on plates at the door? The señor and señora are preparing them to starve.’ The title story in David Leavitt’s Family Dancing begins with a graduation party, flower arrangement and girls in starched tunics, handing trays around. But like the other stories, ‘Family Dancing’ soon scratches its polished surfaces and considers the rough edges of Middle ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... say it. The fellows at Grandpop’s table didn’t trust the new Democratic standard-bearer, Adlai Stevenson. They thought he might be a little soft. They were willing to give Eisenhower the benefit of the doubt; he was a hero of the war, after all. My dad, who didn’t join in the talk much, trusted Ike because he had been able to win a war while negotiating ...”

“... it. Graham was close to Lyndon Johnson, was captivated by Kennedy and was friendly with Adlai Stevenson. At the Democratic Party’s 1960 Convention in Los Angeles he was friends with all the key players and, uniquely, had all their private telephone numbers. By the opening day, Monday, it was clear that the tide was running strongly for Kennedy. Calling ...”

“... Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more ...”

“... of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant – and sometimes damaging – publicity, mainly ...”

“... used to be known as ‘brinkmanship’. Glover records the Strangelovean comment of Adlai Stevenson as US ambassador to the UN that ‘a nuclear war is bound to be divisive’ and judges that the ‘imagination’ (a term apparently used without irony) of the Pentagon top brass ‘had been charged by the traumatic briefing on the full effects of ...”

“... omitted much that is interesting and revealing, but the omission of Bishop’s letters to Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about her work, seems odd. These letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie ...”

“... was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in ...”