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“... not by the peasants who felt her fist in their faces. There are protests by Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell and Adolf Hitler. There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt ...”

“... itself on a boat or raft. While the air thickens with flying misquotations from Major John Wesley Powell’s pioneer navigation of the Canyon in 1869, the less committed among us may reflect that these approved ways of seeing the place are extremely time-consuming, and require the setting aside of three or more days of one’s time, and the advance booking of ...”

“... depicting Hollywood’s own wild party. The paradigm of all movies about Hollywood is probably William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England. The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... Conservative Party in the 1830s were the heirs of the Whigs and Tories who had come together under William Pitt the Younger and his successors to govern Britain almost continuously in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, until the Reform Act made changes of ministries commonplace. They defined their creed in terms of the king’s government: they ...”

“... until the appointed hour for his interview with an old queen in Deal, or with the executed traitor William Joyce’s daughter, by his second wife, in Gillingham. Carry On grotesques, professional alcoholics, poets suffering with their nerves, Broadstairs fascists, economic migrants of every stamp: all the devils are here. From the areal to Ariel, Seabrook ...”

“... and Civil Wars in England in the 1640s; the more general ‘philosophic’ histories of Hume, William Robertson and Gibbon, each wary of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘superstition’; Macaulay on the ‘glorious revolution’ in Britain in 1688; and, in vastly different idioms, Carlyle, Michelet and Taine on what they variously regarded as the glorious or ...”

“... helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier biographers, Professors Jack Barbera and William McBrien (who also compiled the uncollected writings under the nauseating title Me Again), for all their hard work and evident devotion, too often failed in their tone, by turns solemn and arch: a combination of a perhaps mimetic sort to which writing ...”

“... has something in common here with The Little Girls, or The Death of the Heart, as well as with William Trevor’s The Old Boys. Naturally enough, all three distinguished novelists contrive to keep the subject clear of the standard treatment given it by afternoon plays on the BBC (‘Stephanie has come back in middle age to the town where fate once dealt ...”

“... other lengthy attempt by an English novelist to handle part of World War Two as a theme. (Anthony Powell’s three relevant volumes in The Music of Time are too closely woven into the rest of the series to be considered.) The characteristic English novel of the past half-century has been marked, not only by realism rather than fantasy, but also by the quality ...”

“... The term ‘constitutional monarchy’ is bandied about as if it always meant the same thing. William of Orange was a constitutional monarch; so is Elizabeth II. The powers, rights, and obligations accruing to each are, of course, very different. Even written constitutions are subject to different interpretations at different times (as the extension of ...”

“... reviews ‘while they were poring over the latest score from Lords or the Oval’. Later, when William Walton went to see Diaghilev about the possibility of a commission, Lambert went along too and played through his own ballet Adam and Eve, which Diaghilev liked but insisted on retitling Romeo and Juliet, on the grounds that one could hardly ‘expect ...”

“... There was an increasing reliance on court favourites – particularly Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell, the man Campbell describes as the real deputy prime minister. 7. Campbell is interesting on Thatcher’s attitude to local government and here he attempts some psychological history. He makes the point that Thatcher loathed not just Labour, but all local ...”