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“... vituperation was sustained by, among others, a retired member of the Burmese Civil Service named David Alec Wilson, who sent forth a six-volume corrective to Froude which Kaplan rightly calls ‘a historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a ...”

“... We had joined the EEC under Heath and successfully renegotiated the terms of our membership under Wilson. As in most of the rest of Western Europe, what the French called concertation and we called ‘tripartism’ was the order of the day. In office, the Conservatives had painlessly abandoned the neo-liberal flourishes of their 1970 Election Manifesto. The ...”

“... England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ...”

“... A second never knows.’ Supposedly, we only learned how to eat well as a nation when Elizabeth David travelled to the Mediterranean and brought back news of olives, apricots and taramasalata. (Mediterranean Food was published in 1950.) But Meades recalls how his own mother’s cooking changed in the late 1950s, and not necessarily for the better. For the ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... Cripps had courted it with his Popular Front campaign in the Thirties? Should he have challenged Wilson for the leadership in 1972 – not to win, that was out of the question, but to establish a rallying point for the future? After an initial period of debilitating gloom, he went about his business as Commission President with his old skill. Indeed, his ...”

“... short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo always had going for him as war ...”

“... 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his wife. There was also Iris, a film with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as younger and ...”

“... More recently, Edward Heath never quite overcame his unease with the press, while Harold Wilson could never wholly hide the peculiar fascination which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took ...”

“... of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it is the Labour Party, and specifically its left wing, which suffers most severely from myths about a golden past now lost in the mists of time. Even quite well-read Labour politicians are prone to the belief that This Great Movement of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are genius. I mean, it may on the face of it seem stupid to imagine that a researcher – ‘Helen Wilson’ – would choose to spend a thousand hours over the course of a year observing the interaction between pets and their owners in Portland dog parks, in order to determine whether people’s ways of dealing with their dogs attacking or humping other dogs ...”

“... of the 19th century, it’s not clear De Quincey would have come to anything. But, as Frances Wilson says, the benefit was reciprocal: ‘De Quincey helped shape a new kind of professional critic and a new literary genre.’ The ephemerality of the periodical essay suited his temperament. The conversational mode of the medium – its informality of tone ...”

“... Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They are a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured ...”

“... derived from the lurid tales of spookery and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the longstanding suspicion that Wilson was a KGB plant led to rumoured attempts by MI5 and others to undermine him by any means necessary. Even in 1982, these stories seemed to be going out with the ...”