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“... and race ‘functions ornamentally in service to academic publication and career trajectories’. David SterlingBrown’s essay on Shakespeare’s near obsession with white women’s white hands doesn’t bring in his own lived experience, but his monograph Shakespeare’s White Others – in which Titus ...”

“... European literature,’ wrote David Dabydeen in his essay ‘On not being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, ‘is littered with blacks like Man Friday, who falls to earth to worship Crusoe’s magical gun, or the savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury ...”

“... to be taken away from the Treasury, which, in the crunch, always sacrificed everything to protect sterling, and given to a new ministry which would make growth the watchword. To ensure that this growth did not lead to wage inflation, an incomes policy would be imposed from the start; and to ensure that industry became more competitive, a strong attack would ...”

“... for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned any formal adherence to the ...”

“... The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from some of the ...”

“... is particularly good at bringing to life some of the personalities involved. There is George Brown, ‘bellowing on the telephone to No 10, insisting that Harold came over at once and pouring out insults to him on the phone’. There are occasional lunches and dinners à deux with Roy Jenkins, sometimes at the Connaught (‘another demonstration of what ...”

“... treated as the decisive moment in the transition from British to US dominance in the region, but David Wearing shows that, in spite of Suez and other setbacks for Britain on the periphery (the 1958 coup in Iraq, the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s), British influence in fact increased in the core Gulf states over the next 15 years, with successful palace ...”

“... in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the ...”

“... exactly a loss of nerve but a wish not to appear outrageous; it falls back in good order on the sterling old tradition of the heart being in the right place, as in Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of ...”

“... on the Ministry of Technology. (Ah! The DEA! The Ministry of Technology! The tantrums of George Brown! Later that same day, Crossman dined with ‘Wedgwood Benn’ to discuss the menace of Radio Caroline. There is a decomposing madeleine wedged between every leaf of these diaries, which I have just reread.) In his lenient and chivalrous biography of ...”

“... in December 2006 – ‘whether we want to replace them’? The reason seems to be that Gordon Brown was eager to create jobs for BAE shipbuilders in the North-West, while Blair wanted to ensure that the UK would continue in its role as spear-carrier to the US. The US first agreed to provide the UK with submarine-launched ballistic missiles – the Polaris ...”

“... accumulation of worthwhile, but mostly marginal, gestures. The first was the decision by Gordon Brown to hand responsibility for monetary policy over to unelected officials at the Bank of England – supposedly balanced by the subsequent removal of the Bank’s unhappy role in regulating financial services. This was presumably the kind of thing Tony Blair ...”

“... attack those institutions which have to live with the consequences of their parsimony. Thus Gordon Brown, who has done almost as much as any man to keep poorer children out of the universities, blames the universities for excluding poorer children. There is no evidence that such attacks have done the Government any electoral good at all. To spend more, of ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... settlers in Ulster, where his father was a tax receiver and one of his brothers became a sterling defender of the rights of Protestant Ulstermen in the Irish Parliament. Ever after a staunch Whig, Sloane witnessed at first hand the military persecution of his co-religionists in southern France in the 1680s when studying medicine there, and by the end ...”