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“... For the moment, I want to consider its historical evidence against a provocative assertion by A.N. Wilson, quoted in Anthony Blond’s Book Book. According to Wilson (don, novelist, Sunday Telegraph reviewer, Young Fogey and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in ...”

“... finally Brownism took over the peculiarly intense passion of the disoriented heartland. As Harold Wilson had put it decades earlier, Britain simply has to be Great or it is ‘nothing’. Margaret Thatcher took up the same refrain, using an anti-Marxism that would mature into the later 20th century’s neoliberalism. Harvie provides a lively account of this ...”

“... Slaver, The Girl That Disappears and War on the White Slave Trade. The plot varied little: as J.P. Wilson wrote in The White Slave Traffic in 1912, ‘her slavery lasts some five or six years as a rule, and then she is flung out upon the streets, her character gone, her hope dead, her body diseased, to die before long either in a workhouse or a Lock ...”

“... of The Great Gatsby says he sees now ‘that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.’ Or not so subtly, since Gatsby is dead, and Tom and Daisy ...”

“... In the starvation methods of the Anglo-French blockade they believed they had found one. Woodrow Wilson thought economic ‘suffocation’ would be impossible to resist. The French minister of commerce, Étienne Clémentel, commended the notion of subduing ‘unruly’ peoples by manipulating the supply of raw materials. The Versailles powers spoke about law ...”

“... Callaghan, that dire waxwork who embodied the terrible fate of the old dreams of social democracy: Tom Nairn’s phrase about ‘the full medicine pill misery’ of having to ‘behold the gartered Callaghan’ swims back to mind. A similar unease overcomes me each time Morgan writes of the gale of derision directed at Foot’s Worzel Gummidge appearance and ...”

“... author: the real people he describes may seem too predictable for credibility. For instance, Mary Wilson is welcoming guests at 10 Downing Street and immediately begins talking about the difficulty of getting poetry published. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? No, actually. An anecdote may help me here. When I was preparing in 1982 to review Simon Raven’s ...”

“... were failures, that Labour never managed to become ‘the natural party of government’ as Harold Wilson wished, and that this was reflected in its failure ever to get elected for two full terms. Traumatised by four successive defeats, Blair wanted above all to make Labour electable and then to secure those two full terms. This would demonstrate that Blairism ...”

“... have been suspect’. Artists are given a licence to wander, and some – like Jane and Louise Wilson, who have produced eerie video installations by filming the American military base at Greenham Common and the Stasi headquarters in Berlin – use every chance they have. But Moore’s pictures are more unsettlingly close to home: this is ‘“a secure ...”

“... reader stimulated, mildly infuriated, and seriously baffled. ‘Final exams were over.’ Deirdre Wilson’s first sentence snaps at the reader. Anyone who doesn’t know from personal experience what finals are should probably go no further. This novel is not for the unlettered. Slave of the Passions ponders the great question whether there is life after ...”

“... Just the place for a snark, the Bellman said. And with equal assurance, political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal ...”

“... harvested). Nicole Kelleher, a ‘beauty entrepreneur’ and the daughter of the company’s CEO, Tom, has calculated that replacing all the palm oil used in hair and skincare products with the synthetic alternative would save the equivalent in carbon of four million round-the-world flights a year. It would also move wealth back to the US and do nothing to ...”

“... He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and including Woolf, Edmund Wilson (‘No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was’) and V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which he is now published and read, and the misconceptions this has ...”

“... villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ruins of the cottage in which he had been born. He also gave him a letter, reminding him of Churchill’s pledge and pleading the Englishman’s right to go home. If Tyneham was not to be released, then he at least ...”

“... did not want three simultaneous books about himself. Haines, former press secretary to Sir Harold Wilson, was leader-writer of the Daily Mirror when Maxwell bought it and confidently expected the sack, especially after he had publicly voiced scorn for his new master. Attitudes are quick to be struck and unstruck in Fleet Street. Somehow Haines persuaded ...”