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“... In fact, he was remarkably free from snobbery either of the direct or of the inverted type. Mr Philip Williams, in the political biography which he has now published after many years of research, implies that Gaitskell was a good mixer. He cites evidence of Gaitskell’s abiding popularity in his own constituency, the ease with which he made himself ...”

“... Political diaries are the raw material of both biography and history. Philip Williams, who has already quarried Gaitskell’s diary for his own massive biography, is not likely to have found significant new material in subsequently editing it for publication, or to have gained new insights. If he has, he has not drawn attention to them ...”

“... one paragraph to go, to deny the evident rationale of his book. And Brivati needs a rationale: Philip Williams’s monumental biography of Gaitskell is unlikely to be equalled, let alone surpassed. Not only was Williams the greatest political analyst of his time but he had access to the voluminous private papers ...”

“... Bevan as a monumental study of ‘the man and his socialism’. It is repeatedly contrasted with Philip Williams’s biography of Gaitskell, always in order to say how much better Foot’s book is – it being understood that Foot was a Bevanite, Williams a Gaitskellite. Once in full flow Morgan writes in the same ...”

“... leaders and a mere two sentences in the joint communiqué.’ I can shed some light here. The late Philip Williams, when researching his massive biography of Gaitskell, an unparalleled picture of the postwar Labour Party, interviewed Norman Brook, the cabinet secretary who accompanied Attlee to Washington. The visit, ...”

“... and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very obvious strength of character if they were to attain recognition’) are the only women who might be described as ...”

“... Security is the problem that exercises both Philip Roth and Raymond Williams. The sort of ‘security’ I mean is the sort that spreads a feeling of insecurity – a fear of surveillance, bugging, secret cameras, interrogation, the false smile of Mr Nice and the sincere snarl of Mr Nasty ...”

“... the sex, the friendships and the passions behind the scenes are counter-productive. Hence the late Philip Williams, Gaitskell’s biographer, was wrong to assume that his hero’s politics were unaffected by his love affairs. As for method, the biographer is a creative egotist, akin to the novelist or the painter. ‘The aim is to create a picture, not to ...”

“... think of pseudy dudes in black 501s and Doc Martens, then I would prescribe a small daily dose of Philip Terry, for whom being experimental chiefly means being thoughtfully rebellious and funny. In his translation of Dante’s Inferno (2014), Terry is guided through the hell that is the University of Essex (where he is professor of creative writing) by the ...”

“... Madison suite of Sacha’s Hotel in Manchester (motto: ‘Sacha’s Only Looks Expensive’), Paul Williams recalls an unrewarding encounter with Bob Dylan: ‘But I shook his hand which was ... and this was at the beginning of the tour ... and things changed significantly during the tour ... he became more sociable, I’ve been talking to a number of people ...”

“... brother died on the Eastern Front and Fallada ‘discovers his heart for the revolution’. Jenny Williams’s meticulous biography More Lives than One narrates the 1911 episode in painstaking detail, but doesn’t pathologise Fallada’s entire life in the light of the early misfortune, as Fallada himself does. And to her, the outbreak of the First World War ...”

“... Rightly admired as a critic, an interpreter of ‘culture and society’, Raymond Williams was disappointing as a writer of fiction. The Eggs of the Eagle is the second volume of ‘People of the Black Mountains’, his uncompleted ‘historical novel’. There are 17 short stories or sketches, rather dismal slices of life in south-eastern Wales, between the Wye and the Usk: they are set in six different centuries, from AD 82 to 1415 ...”

“... of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh discoveries arrive, the most striking evidence we have ...”

“... appears in Malle’s Milou en Mai, 1989 – ‘a sort of quotation from myself’, as he says to Philip French in Malle on Malle. The helplessness in post-war French films has many tones and registers: angry, baffled, melancholy, defeatist, displaced. And of course I am not suggesting it is the only image or story on offer; or that the films which picture it ...”

“... romantic socialism of Aneurin Bevan, and for the romantic sociology of Michael Young and Raymond Williams, as the views of these three have been characterised. One of the best sayings culled for the new volume is drawn from Bevan, and is as good as the ‘poetry’ heard by someone in his speeches. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ Bevan responded to a sneer about the ...”