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“... spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her like a kite at the end of a string’. George Wyndham, Margot Asquith. ‘When I read of Parnell or Lasalle or smaller men who have arrested attention,’ Margot confided in her diary in her twenties, ‘I feel full of envy, and wish I had been born a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a ...”

“... life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that period, helped along by my mother’s stories of their family friend ...”

“... Tory conferences where the mood could best be described as hostile – yet David Cameron and even George Osborne appear genuinely committed to the project. They see it as a way of boosting business and of demonstrating their credentials as modernisers. They also believe it will help their electoral prospects in the North. The fate of HS2 doesn’t just lie in ...”

“... over Vietnam, and the same MI5 and MI6 whom he had encouraged via the good offices of the bad George Wigg, were to find him unsound in spite of (or perhaps also partly because of?) his gruesome eagerness to please. None of Wilson’s exculpatory recent biographers has troubled to minute this irony, if indeed it is one.There came a time, late in the life ...”

“... Women’s Freedom League; the Cat and Mouse and Dickinson Bills date from 1913, not 1912; Ramsay MacDonald and Kathleen Courtney and Willoughby Dickinson are mis-spelt; Andrew Rosen gets the wrong Christian name on page 29; and the misleading term ‘radical suffragist’ is used to denote Lancashire working-class non-militants – a term not used at the ...”

“... remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ...”

“... competition.With imperial responsibilities came a new hauteur towards Indigenous peoples. Sir George Simpson, the HBC’s governor in North America, turned against the custom of factors taking ‘country’ wives, dismissing them as ‘bits of copper’. In 1846, the settlement of the American border at the 49th parallel forced the HBC to retreat ...”

“... among Communists towards the social democratic parties of Europe, whose leaders (except for Ramsay MacDonald) had sold the pass only twenty-five years before. Right and wrong in the argument about war and co-operation with the social democrats seem obvious to us now. In fact, the issue was bitterly contested throughout the inter-war period. It did not spring ...”

“... responsibility of Büro S, and at the time of this historic broadcast the announcers were Sergeant MacDonald and Guardsman William Humphrey Griffiths of the British Army, both recruited from German prisoner-of-war camps. While broadcasting for Büro S, they lived in an apartment in Berlin, wore civilian clothes, were provided with supplies of tobacco and ...”

“... or the force of vested interest, are no longer able to do. As defined by someone like Ramsay MacDonald this is what constitutes ‘socialism’ – a process by which society inevitably evolves into collective forms of life – and in MacDonald’s case it did not even require a working-class party to further it. This ...”

“... and his domination of economic policy remind one alarmingly of the relationship between Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: between a Prime Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ...”

“... the smell of manure in the streets. He loved the monarchy and had a particular attachment to George VI. When he travelled to America he would take Wisden to read on the plane. He carried on reading (only) the Times right throughout the 1940s when it was vitriolically anti-Labour, saying that he found its political opinions so predictable they were ...”

“... looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too. Never one to underestimate his own impact, he reported to his second wife, Nowell, that a colleague had said he was ‘one of three English public men who could command the ...”

“... of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to Wakefield, where George Gissing is not commemorated as fully as he might be – too ‘grim’, perhaps, and too heavily challenged, like many formerly industrial towns and all socialist novelists, for a happy ending. McKie’s purpose is not so much to deny that present-day ...”

“... to his programmatic radicalism. One other figure who flits through this early period is Ramsay MacDonald, already dreaming of being prime minister while running a ‘Fellowship House’ in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. Ellis left London for a medical practice in Blackburn in 1887, and managed to survive the death of his mother (she died as he was reading ...”