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“... As Sissela Bok’s book illustrates, it is a deep and nearly universal desire of those in power; Des Wilson’s collection of articles powerfully documents and eloquently attacks its special intensity in this country, the most officially secretive among democracies. Sissela Bok’s thoughtful book is not concerned only with official secrets, though they ...”

“... One Hundred and One Damnations demonstrated? In a racy account of the Alliance election campaign Des Wilson gives an excellent sense of what it must be like to be a hyperactive member of the crew of a plane which refuses to take off, waiting for the surge which never comes. The final section of his book, which is an election diary, has the merit of ...”

“... The serious study of fashion​ has repeatedly had to justify itself,’ observes Elizabeth Wilson in the introduction to Adorned in Dreams, a study of fashion which, in itself, may help to render such justifications redundant; her book is the best I have read on the subject, bar none. Fashion is part of social practice: it is an industry whose demands have helped to shape modern history, and choosing our clothes is the nearest most of us will ever get to practical aesthetics ...”

“... is, to start with, not abstract at all, since it refers to a kind of encyclopedia or dictionnaire des idées reçues. All of these titles point to something about the book in question, I suppose, but none quite hits its central merit or interest. And it does play into the hands of that slack critical cliché, where a work is always found to be (weak ...”

“... by the Allies, on the charge of being the criminal mainly responsible for the War’. Woodrow Wilson, informed of the decision as he embarked for France on 3 December, refused to commit the US to anything until he reached Paris. But although by the spring of 1920 it had become evident that neither an international trial in absentia nor a trial in Holland ...”

“... do more harm than it has to. This is a painful matter, especially for anyone who admires Angus Wilson’s novels very much, and who believes that it is with the best of intentions that he plotted and plaited what turns out to be a nouement. But the road to this particular Hell Fire Club is paved with good intentions, and the primrose path is made no less ...”

“... Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate what ...”

“... Volume One of Anthony Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, left our hero in January 1960 under sentence of death, no more than a few months to live. With one bound, or at least one letter from the Neurological Institute, he is free. ‘The protein content of my spinal liquor had gone down dramatically’: the death sentence is cancelled ...”

“... spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’ As Ian Hamilton tells it in Writers in Hollywood, Maeterlinck was ...”

“... in favour of its passing. To be fair to them, they voted No on the instructions of Woodrow Wilson, who could not bear that his beloved treaty should be sullied by any amendment, so the own goal must be credited to him. In popular memory, the defeat of the treaty has been blamed on the bloc of isolationist senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge of ...”

“... where he stood now his country was at war, declaring in his presidential address to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques that ‘the struggle on which we are engaged against Germany is the struggle of civilisation itself against barbarism’ and that, in its ‘brutality and cynicism’, the enemy had ‘regressed to the savage state’. This ...”

“... she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children.’ The following year Edmund Wilson asked Connolly, now two years into his divorce, why he didn’t get someone else. ‘I’m still on the flypaper,’ Connolly replied. ‘I’ve got most of my legs loose, but I haven’t yet quite got off.’ A few months later Skelton married her next ...”

“... Knowles, were not entirely voluntary. In 1694 he killed a well-connected gentleman called Edward Wilson in a quarrel in London, and, although he managed to escape from England after a period in jail, he remained for much of his life an outlaw in that jurisdiction. The Europe in which he travelled was scarred by two decades of major warfare, the War of the ...”

“... calculating machines’. Attlee regarded theory as stuff and nonsense and Harold Wilson doused his food with HP Sauce to project a plain-man image. It was the people’s dominatrix who caused a turnaround. Pragmatic to the core, she took up philosophers she agreed with and allowed her instincts to be dignified as an ideology. Since ...”

“... during the summer of 1982, culminating in the shoot-up at Jo Goldenburg’s restaurant in the Rue des Rosiers, with its six deaths, have urgently raised the question, ‘La France: estelle anti-sémite?’ The fact that Léon Blum was the object of violent hostility because he was Jewish, the realisation that under Vichy there were many Frenchmen who were ...”