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“... volume of which had just appeared when she began The Great Fortune in 1956; the other, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which had reached its third volume in 1955. Powell was then literary editor of Punch and Manning often wrote reviews for him. According to the Braybrookes, she bought all the volumes of ...”

“... aloof and misanthropic: ‘An unpleasant man,’ P.G. Wodehouse told an interviewer in the 1970s. Kenneth Clark, with whom Hastings says Maugham enjoyed a ‘firm friendship’, described him as ‘an extremely mysterious character’; Christopher Isherwood likened him to a Gladstone bag: ‘God only knows what is inside.’ (Maugham said much the same about ...”

“... audiences howling into their tumblers for years. To someone like me who grew up thinking Kenneth Williams was the perfect English gentleman (and imagining Russell Harty and Lily Savage to be the perfect Northern blokes), the words of Norman Tebbit are not just mad in the way you’d expect from him, but also profoundly at odds with something ...”

“... has to be reconstructed as he appeared at the time in the eyes of respectable opinion: the Enoch Powell of the day. Alas, biographers often confine their sympathy to a single individual and his allies, and so it is here. The wealth of research is flawed by a determination to prosecute ‘the guilty men’ on Churchill’s behalf. But if the function of ...”

“... the EEC (so much for Curval) and compulsory repatriation of ‘aliens’. He is not called Enoch Powell. The SPG has just been enlarged to regimental strength. The outgoing Tory government has denationalised the Health Service. England are doing badly in the Test series against South Africa. The insider of the title is an outsider – an alien. He came from ...”

“... to his plans for Saddam Hussein in January 2003. So he had and so he did.In Plan of Attack *, Kenneth Adelman tells Woodward about a celebratory dinner party given by Cheney soon after the invasion of Iraq had begun. Adelman is a neo-con activist, who until 2005 was on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, and in the two-year run-up to the war appeared ...”

“... of the current po-mo poster boys, Tao Lin, with his anaesthetised declarative sentences, and Kenneth Goldsmith with his ‘uncreative writing’, such as a transcription of a year’s worth of daily radio weather reports. Foucault notes: ‘Today’s writing has freed itself from the theme of expression.’ Even the title of the book unchains the ...”

“... affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our ...”

“... not by the peasants who felt her fist in their faces. There are protests by Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell and Adolf Hitler. There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt ...”

“... ends meet. Betjeman’s bumbling, bluffing exterior and his sterling war work as assistant to Sir Kenneth Clark at the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, and then as a press attaché to Sir John Maffey, the senior British diplomat in Ireland, where he was possibly a spy for the British Government. The poems tossed off on the back of envelopes, and ...”

“... poor and teachers unwilling to admit this (he isn’t a fan of the NUT); he was a supporter of Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act, even though it was a dog’s breakfast, because it introduced a national curriculum and student testing. He early on argued for the elimination of Clause IV, partly because it was anachronistic, partly because he ...”

“... as nice as he looks.’ In that mode of feline understatement, nothing can overtake the words of Kenneth Clark (who was all eyes), that ‘Cyril was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort ...”

“... starl. No sense of starl.’ He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of ...”

“... to any single position. Its founding members included proto-Thatcherite free marketeers like Enoch Powell and Angus Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – ...”

“... touching institutions that enjoyed wide public support. She was, for example, much less ready than Kenneth Clarke to reform the NHS. The enforced sale of council housing was part of her original programme, but it was assumed to be risk-free and had long been contemplated by the party. It was the success of the privatisation – a word she did not particularly ...”