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“... a ‘spoils system’ whereby party functionaries were rewarded with government jobs, and, in Andrew Jackson, a charismatic leader.The intense competition between Democrats and their rivals – the Whigs, and then Republicans – galvanised popular participation in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser ...”

“... find work to support the family. Emilio died in 2011 aged 101. When I told a friend, the writer Andrew Greig, that I was writing this piece, he told me that his father, born in 1899, came down with Spanish flu while on leave from the war in France. ‘His convalescence delayed his return to the front, where his battalion was all but wiped out,’ ...”

“... forms of celebrity – sacred and secular. ‘Not only did she capture the spirit of the age,’ Andrew Morton writes on the last page of the most recent edition of his famous book, ‘but more than that the manner of her life and death formed part of a religious cycle of sin and redemption, a genuinely good and Christian woman who was martyred for our ...”

“... by Kingsley Amis, Four Quartets, Brideshead Revisited, Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Cooper, Angus Wilson, Horizon, architectural Modernism and the Festival of Britain. Just as you think something important is going to be left out it turns up: the bourgeois intellectual love-affair with France, the nascent aspirations towards internationalism in art. It is all ...”

“... to see if they could force a few into life with a bucket of departmental fertiliser. Charles Wilson has argued that the main skill of the entrepreneur is the possession of ‘a sense of market opportunity combined with the capacity needed to exploit it’. The opportunities available in the North Sea since BP’s discovery of the West Sole gas ...”

“... many of whom pass through his pages leaving hardly a trace. David Frost, Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of right-wing Tory MPs like ...”

“... I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above everyone else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official biographer, have been at fault here ...”

“... have an otherworldly and dreamlike quality that is as thrilling as anything in cinema. The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that watching their close-ups was like ‘gorging on chocolate sundaes’. His face is as sculpted as hers is soft. ‘Do I make you nervous?’ she asks him as she enters a pool room wearing a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the ...”

“... money and wider distribution. He regrets the loss, but maintains the friendship. ‘I hired Andrew Wylie to reconstruct my publishing life and get a New York publisher,’ Ginsberg announces in 1983, 27 years after the appearance of Howl and Other Poems. And then, a year later: ‘I told Andy to figure out a way that will leave everybody … not feeling ...”

“... work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s grandmother was a smallholder and herbalist, and ...”

“... to called it theirs. ‘The first time I met Rosemary she was with the Shankhill Help,’ said Wilson Free-burn, with a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It was 12 years ago and we had no money and I was involved in community relations and she was trying to give Citizens Advice.’ He stared into the Formica. ‘She had sparkle you know – and she never ...”

“... desires and aspirations’ were best represented by ‘dukes, earls and barons’. Later Harold Wilson used exactly the same analogy to Smith. Most Colonial Office personnel seem to have taken Banda’s and Wilson’s side. In March 1965 the British high commissioner in Southern Rhodesia attended some of Smith’s ...”

“... Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his faux modesty with: ‘Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard ...”

“... One of the most amusing – or, if you prefer it, one of the most heartwarming – episodes in the history of early Modernism centres on Ezra Pound’s attempt to ‘liberate’ T.S. Eliot from his clerk’s job at Lloyds Bank. In 1921, Pound started up a fund called Bel Esprit and set about trying to persuade 30 subscribers to fork out ten pounds each: £300 p ...”

“... to create is played out. His findings are damning. On 5 October 1965, as the massacres began, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Jakarta, told the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ On the following day, the Foreign Office in ...”