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“... In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial. Lionel Trilling called The Professor’s House ‘lame’ and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found ...”

“... biography. Not all libraries have yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications ...”

“... up with the 19-year-old Princess Anne: Tyrrel borrows from another royal biographer, Christopher Wilson, the speculation that ‘it was to Andrew’ that Anne ‘surrendered her virginity’. It wasn’t that Camilla was worried he might marry Anne (Andrew was Catholic and therefore out of the question) but that he had bagged the most high-profile catch ...”

“... much liked Mosley, consoled herself with the thought that ‘she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands.’ (Mosley was always known as ‘Tom’ just as Cynthia was known as ‘Cimmie’.) Mosley himself, in his autobiography, described his marriage to Cimmie as ‘an event in my life of outstanding ...”

“... British state.3 This history has its own familiar antiheroes: MacDonald, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock, Blair, Brown, Miliband. That this is to list nearly all of Labour’s leaders is part of the point. (What is not so frequently mentioned is that much of the conservatism of the Labour Party when it came to the empire, monarchy, the ...”

“... and those deported to the Australian mainland survived. (William Lanne, the ‘last man’ of Tom Lawson’s title, died in 1869; two Tasmanian women survived him briefly.) There is also disagreement about the way they met their end, or rather about the relative roles played by settler violence, intertribal conflict, exogenous diseases, declining ...”

“... figure in Jackson’s book were buzzing about the Sillars camp. Two of them – Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with fervently pro-market ...”

“... such an idiot, that girl,’ she said. ‘How so?’ ‘She’s going out with Kenny Wilson now. Which is bad enough. The thing is, Kenny hasn’t told Agnes, and when she finds out, it’s going to get nasty.’ I racked my brain. I tried to picture Kenny Wilson, but I couldn’t place him, and I didn’t ...”

“... Haiti and Liberia were even reminded that Ireland had never engaged in the slave trade. President Wilson should, it was thought, be treated as a sincere man ‘striving to give effect to his programme of freedom for all nations and struggling against all the forces of tyranny, imperialism and lusty world power which are seeking to dominate the Peace ...”

“... did not offer coagulation by locality. Meanwhile Baker’s parodies roll rightmindedly by: Harold Wilson and the trade unions get theirs, and so of course do Kinnock and the nuclear fudgers. Fair enough, or rather not quite enough, since it is only Baker’s party pris which deems right-wing mendacious folly to be a protected species. Anyway these ...”

“... major trade-union leader of recent times was under regular surveillance by MI 5 ... Yet both Wilson and Heath forbade any interrogation.’ Pincher does not exaggerate the importance of the pre-war Cambridge connection, with one exception. That is John Cairncross, a non-smart Cambridge man of Scottish working-class background, who though detected in 1951 ...”

“... months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers on one day. Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said that 500 new members of the RUC would be recruited, but he didn’t mention bringing in fresh troops. It is clear now that the SAS and possibly other undercover units were staking out police stations in anticipation ...”

“... 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few schoolfriends together, and said to them: ‘We ...”

“... of money, public adulation and staggering self-belief. ‘I really believe,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, whom he had met at Princeton, that ‘no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.’ But he was already anticipating his later failure. ‘I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings ...”

“... when Ernest Bevin was Foreign Secretary and Zionist forces were attacking the British. However, Tom Segev points out that the British Army, as it withdrew from Palestine a year later, was careful to hand over its main military bases to the Zionist forces even as it attempted to protect Jaffa’s Arabs from eviction. For Israel’s new historians, among them ...”