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“... an invaluable account of its evolution, told by Martin Hickman of the Independent, and the MP Tom Watson. Watson has been particularly close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed Rupert Murdoch’s ...”

“... In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail he kept from George Plimpton for years. His third novel, Raditzer (1961), depicts yet another young man of means resisting paternal influence: Charles Stark foregoes joining his father’s law firm to enlist in the navy just as the war is ending. Shipping out to the ...”

“... went to Harvard, where he despised his ‘gilded wastrel’ classmates, studied philosophy under George Santayana and helped to produce the Harvard Monthly; and Oxford, where he had an intense friendship and possibly a love affair with Vivien Haigh-Wood, who married Eliot the day Thayer boarded the ship back to the US. The newlyweds held him in low ...”

“... wanker ye.’ I’ve never had this experience in England and have never missed it. Like George J. Watson in his wry and subtle autobiographical piece in The Rattle of the North I believe that English culture, though it’s often a lot less fun than the Irish, contains a core of calm and civility I can never ...”

“... Saddened and dissatisfied, I returned to Glasgow to tell the girls’ story. The Glasgow MP George Galloway was in Islamabad to receive an award from Benazir Bhutto’s government, and I thought he might intervene on the girls’ behalf. He told me he could not get involved because the girls lived in another MP’s constituency but suggested that I ask ...”

“... Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden ... Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby fan, as Dr Watson ... He would, you feel, have snarled a hole in the screen. A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of the lower-middle-class childhood ...”

“... by comparison, only marrying twice. As Taylor has already written in his superb bi0graphy of George Orwell (2003), the wedding of Sonia and George took place round a bed in University College Hospital, and Orwell would be dead from TB three months later. ‘A shrewd investment, or an act of self-sacrifice?’ Taylor ...”

“... than is offered here. Ross of Exeter was ‘moderate’, Green of Lincoln ‘a liberal’, Watson of Llandaff ‘extremely liberal’; Butler of Oxford was ‘a conservative’, Newton of Bristol ‘fairly conservative’. What liberalism and conservatism mean in this context is not explained: aside from the anachronistic nature of such terms, it is ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... seconds, before whipping out a revolver and shooting a suspiciously dark supporter in the George Fox Stand (since United fans are known colloquially as ‘Arabs’). This muddle of transdisciplinary pretentiousness comes from a book called Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost, and, yes, the paradise in question is indeed John Milton’s ...”

“... student from Sparta [who] was a truly magnificent farter’. Beyond him he does not venture. Julia Watson stops with the old man of Blackheath who sat on his set of false teeth. Calamity and the gruesome, the crude and the slapstick, are given a suitable amount of space, and Harry Graham is perhaps overworked, though children, who are never satisfied with a ...”

“... of a clever young psychologist. Sonia Brownell also worked on Horizon, resisting the advances of George Orwell until his terminal illness and the great success of 1984. Connolly tended to implore the previous lady to take him back after it was too late. He and Barbara Skelton quarrelled violently in the car on the way to their wedding and their way back from ...”

“... profits were as huge as the poverty generating them and the established clergy approved. Bishop Watson preached – and published! – a sermon on ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God, in having made both Rich and Poor’ to the Poor Relief officers of Westminster. Such an angel as Watson was obviously wingless. Phoney ...”

“... for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the dark-haired ‘girl next door’, Mary Jane Watson, a mere glass of beer – the champagne of Gwen Stacy was not for the likes of us. So, Karl and I resented Spider-Man like we resented the Beatles, for being such lavish evidence we’d been born too late. The 1970s adventures were overly reverent, full of ...”

“... The last monarch​ to have a funeral at Westminster Abbey was George II in 1760. It was the first time chairs were set out for an audience. Horace Walpole recorded that the duke of Newcastle arrived weeping noisily and pretended to faint. When the archbishop of Canterbury offered him smelling salts, the duke leaped up and ran around the church with a spyglass to see who ‘was or was not there ...”