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“... the 1880s, and especially after 1910, trade union militancy became impossible to ignore. Ramsay MacDonald blamed it on the loss of noblesse oblige, and Heffer agrees: the decadence of the ruling class ‘had provoked the often successful challenges of the Labour movement’. In 1909 the House of Lords displayed its unconstitutional and class-bound ...”

“... the Labour Movement, and risking his own leadership, than any previous Labour prime minister since MacDonald. Rather than trim and temporise, he had stuck doggedly to his guns until disarmed by his own Cabinet. It was a bold and honourable endeavour to take the measure of the trade-union problem – an attempt which has been increasingly vindicated by the ...”

“... Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years ...”

“... At the start of the inquest in December, an application for an indefinite adjournment was made by Michael Mansfield QC on behalf of the Lawrences. ‘Dramatic’ new evidence had been unearthed and the family planned to use this in a private prosecution. If the inquest proceeded it might prejudice such a prosecution. The Coroner granted the request. It was ...”

“... from … non-censorship’. Most of these essays are excellent, however; and some, such as MacDonald Jackson’s study of authorship or John Jowett’s investigation of Middleton’s early readers, are definitive. The Collected Works is, of course, a prodigious achievement that only someone with Taylor’s infectious energy and obsessive determination ...”

“... lectured in Europe. He married four times. He never settled down at a magazine for long, as Dwight Macdonald or Edmund Wilson eventually settled down at the New Yorker, or Howe settled down at his own magazine, Dissent, or Irving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz at theirs. He was never at home anywhere for very long. He was simply never at home. Cook’s biography ...”

“... recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended treatment, while the massive life of Churchill is unique in its Victorian dimensions. Today, the best way for a politician to guarantee this much-coveted form of life after death is to write it himself. And if he entertains ...”

“... as the postwar cults of Kafka, existentialism and human rights, and in the writings of Dwight Macdonald and Susan Sontag. Thomist theologians were as much a part of it as New York’s Jewish intellectuals. ‘Man,’ Greif writes, ‘became at mid-century the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognised, helped, rescued, made the centre, the ...”

“... his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed ...”

“... tried at the last minute to stay. Beatson brought to his splendid house his bride Christina MacDonald, daughter of the factor who supervised the Clearances, and thus bonded himself deeply into the island’s ruling class. All this and more I find out from Mary Kate’s documents and conversation, which disclose one cache of island history after another ...”

“... There is​ still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ‘We shall fight on the beaches ...”

“... failure in politics expressed a refusal to compromise are invoked against ‘traitors’ like MacDonald and Jenkins and wheeler-dealers such as Wilson. In particular, the highly intelligent Scottish politicians now so prominent on Labour’s Front Bench have to live with the oral history of folksong, and with comparison in young minds with Harry ...”

“... by Harold Wilson’s government in February 1965. The first request had been made to Ramsay MacDonald’s government sometime between 1929 and 1931. This was refused, as were de Valera’s requests to Stanley Baldwin and Churchill, and Sean Lemass’s request to Harold Macmillan. In her account of the discussions between the two governments about ...”

“... and critics. The part they played has been recognised in this centenary year by the reissue of Michael Longley’s perceptive, beautifully introduced Selected Poems and by the addition of a fine preface by Derek Mahon to The Strings Are False. It would be good to have back in print Edna Longley’s study of 1988 which did so much to rescue MacNeice from ...”

“... production’. Whether Wilson expected the union leaders, whom he knew well, to bite is not clear. Michael Foot gave the rationale for killing off the idea when he rose in the Commons to say that the Left was not against an incomes policy – ‘indeed, we believe such a policy is essential to socialism’ – but that in this case the Government had ...”