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“... his colleagues’ doubts about wearing court dress when they came into office in 1924, Ramsay MacDonald’s assurance to a relieved George V that he would wean them off singing the ‘Red Flag’ sufficiently indicated the first Labour government’s distance from the barricades. Baldwin was, however, much helped by his ...”

“... precipitately, than any Labour government has ever done. Two favourable reviewers of my recent George Orwell: A Life (there were others) have called me a ‘right-wing socialist’ (Michael Foot) and ‘social democratic’ (Peter Sedgwick), perhaps not noticing that I, too, have been on a long journey, affected by Orwell as well as studying him (he does ...”

“... Novak, who gives him a little talk about politics and literature and asks if he knows Miss Betty MacDonald. (Zuckerman fears she might be a CIA agent, but Novak means the author of The Egg and I, a work much admired by Czech bien-pensants.) Novak supposes that Zuckerman will have recognised by now that the Czech dissidents he has met are ‘sexual ...”

“... evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John Russell because there are few private papers; Gladstone and Salisbury because their careers were too long for any one writer to encompass ...”

“... in which the British played up, but hardly played the game. Thus the tale of poor Sir Hector MacDonald, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ceylon, driven to suicide in 1903 after being discovered romping with four Sinhalese boys in a railway carriage, leads into a broad discussion of sex and masculinity in the Empire. And an evocation of the ...”

“... as the postwar cults of Kafka, existentialism and human rights, and in the writings of Dwight Macdonald and Susan Sontag. Thomist theologians were as much a part of it as New York’s Jewish intellectuals. ‘Man,’ Greif writes, ‘became at mid-century the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognised, helped, rescued, made the centre, the ...”

“... of the SNP’s first serious incursion into Glasgow politics: the by-election victories of Margo MacDonald in 1973 and her husband, Jim Sillars, in 1988.I wandered down Govan Road, past several community support projects and smart new blocks of housing association flats which are supposed to drive regeneration – together with a bridge due to open in the ...”

“... the writer working and sleeping in the house alone. We spoke on the phone sometimes about Dwight MacDonald and essayists he knew and loved. And one time we had a conversation by satellite at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Norman had a way of delighting audiences and he worked them, playing the old roué, then next minute the fierce political ...”

“... mission to bring democracy to the world’s benighted. In The Fight Is for Democracy (2003), George Packer argued that a ‘vibrant, hardheaded liberalism’ could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals ...”

“... Pass On the Torch of Life)’.Buchan was close to Stanley Baldwin and later to Ramsay MacDonald, but neither saw him as cabinet material. His parliamentary colleagues found his speeches Rees- Moggianly eccentric: ‘How could you take a man entirely seriously if he talked in Ciceronian periods, yet your children were snatching his latest thriller ...”

“... south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical superiority of the Government forces was more than matched by the mobility of the Scottish irregulars and the imaginativeness of their leaders. When the Jacobites swung east from Barnet to approach London ...”

“... back on the pre-reform era, saw little reason to dispute its unsavoury reputation. Even Michael MacDonald, whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in ...”

“... period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’. In ...”

“... The Merchant of Venice in 1970, he says, Olivier turned up with a hook nose and goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal ...”

“... were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she supported, usually with some individual overtone, the advanced causes of the era, from Castro to Vietnam. In the early Sixties she achieved a succès de scandale with her articles (for the New Yorker) on the Eichmann Trial in ...”