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“... unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in Corbyn, and only forty ...”

“... for a set of right-wing policies espoused in the 1970s by Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and by miscellaneous demented conservatives ever since: ‘rolling back the state’ and ‘empowering the individual’ through privatisation, tax cuts and deregulation. But before that it referred to a body of theory about markets and how ...”

“... was sifted through other writers, chief among them being an Eastern lady called Luise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, known for obvious reasons as Dame Shirley, whose letters from the California mines are a minor masterpiece of social observation, and from whom – irony of ironies – even Mark Twain seems to have picked up a trick or two. James, who anticipated ...”

“... was expanding into a biography when I last heard, while Alan Bell, whose work on Sydney Smith is drawing to a close, plans to move up the street in Combe Florey and produce ‘a biographical study’. Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is not absurd. It ...”

“... of ‘The Thistles in Sweden’ (1976) remembers the apartment in which he lived with his wife Margaret in 1950: a threadbare rug; a white Meissen plate with small green grape leaves and a wide filigree border; an oil painting of a rock quarry in Maine; Swedish linen curtains printed with a motif of blue and grey thistles. There was a cat, Floribunda, on ...”

“... her own daughters’ schooling she was unrepentant. ‘I don’t know what she meant,’ Princess Margaret’s biographer reports her having said, ‘after all I and my sisters only had governesses and we all married well – one of us very well.’ What she learned instead of academic subjects was how to charm, disarm and deflect criticism by pointing out ...”

“... pose, as I came to appreciate when we spent some time in Rhodesia during the closing years of the Smith-run settler dictatorship. Worsthorne was hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles ...”

“... that was all he knew and all I needed to know. In anthropology two experiences stand out. Margaret Mead recalled that when she was a girl she and her sister foraged excitedly and a bit furtively in The Golden Bough because Frazer was the only author in their parents’ large library with anything to say (in English) about sex. It also seemed a good ...”

“... view. The polls show quite clearly that public opinion moved against the Tories long before John Smith died in 1994 – and that the reasons for this shift had far more to do with the rise in VAT on fuel, Norman Lamont’s Exchange Rate Mechanism fiasco, and Michael Heseltine’s pit closures than with any decision of a Labour Party Special Conference. The ...”

“... What Tory MPs really wanted,’ Margaret Thatcher writes of the Westland affair, ‘was leadership, frankness and a touch of humility, all of which I tried to provide.’ A great deal of indignant energy has fired the reviews of this book, many of them by Mrs Thatcher’s former Cabinet colleagues, largely because of the sheer outrageousness of those claims to frankness and humility ...”

“... monks. Similarly, to call medieval poems like ‘Adam lay y-bounden’ and Skelton’s ‘Merry Margaret’ light is to seem to suggest that this all-too-sophisticated, even decadent culture must be, because distant, something like quaint – that Merry Margaret lived in Merrie England. And if this is true of Skelton, how ...”

“... centre-left leaders such as Prescott, Blunkett and Hain merged into the Blairite mass or, like Margaret Beckett, Michael Meacher and Kinnock himself, became bit players on the political stage, Cook remained a prominent and prickly reminder of the electoral calculations that had won Blair the leadership in 1994. In this respect, he was undoubtedly helped by ...”

“... fine to avoid being ‘well whipped’. Marshfield was more fortunate than the quarrelsome midwife Margaret Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary Johnson, pregnant with an illegitimate child, who was condemned six months later, having confessed to ‘familiarity with the devil’. In the years following ...”

“... George was a travelling salesman selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres & Smith turned their production over to military headgear. He persisted nevertheless, setting off day after day, decade ...”

“... repository of the Reithian BBC’s nationalised moralism and authority. The following week, Joan Smith pursued a similarly dangerous line in the Independent on Sunday: ‘In recent days ... those of us who are not willing to pretend to emotions we don’t feel have been getting an ominous message – that we ought to keep quiet. It’s a message which is not ...”