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“... all because of our fucking surname,’ exclaimed the exasperated Valerie Hobson, the wife of Jack Profumo, when ‘the Profumo scandal’ was resurrected many years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his ...”

“... the staff lunch that allowed him to behave as ‘an encyclopedic egoist’, in his colleague Ivor Brown’s phrase, who drank large brandies and smoked big cigars and entertained a loyal audience that included the proprietor, the courtly Waldorf, and writers such as C.A. Lejeune, hired as film critic from the Manchester Guardian, and Joyce Grenfell, who as ...”

“... the American way.’ ‘Right. And he doesn’t like the American way?’ ‘He hates it.’ Jack Levy, still sitting forward, braces his elbows on his desktop and his chin thoughtfully on his intertwined fingers. ‘And you, Mr Mulloy? You hate it?’ The boy shyly casts his eyes down again. ‘I of course do not hate all Americans. But the American ...”

“... bad taste Lubitsch was wrongly accused of. There are musical numbers, including ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ in Polish, a comic Hitler sequence borrowed from The Great Dictator, and great performances from Brooks himself, Anne Bancroft and José Ferrer. But the jokes are not about Nazis or about history. They are about the piety and melodrama we have wrapped ...”

“... in North Wales when a friend mentions a newspaper headline. ‘The headline was WHERE IS JACK RAYNER? It said that lots of money was missing as well. Is that your dad?’ Rayner thinks for a minute about how he might stick up for his father then says: ‘No ... That’s not my dad. Must be someone else.’ But in all fairness, the first lie was cast ...”

“... terrible friend.’ The epigram was coined by a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge called Jack Gallagher, You could adapt it to the present mood in Europe by saying: ‘Asylum seekers are a menace. Each one of us is someone’s menacing asylum seeker.’ It doesn’t even have to be a Gypsy; it could just be the retired couple fleeing from Guildford ...”

“... in 1982 and that summer got pregnant and got married, in that order, to the trade-union organiser Jack Dromey. Afterwards, when they were on holiday (‘we certainly never called it a “honeymoon”’), the sitting MP, Harry Lambourn, died. ‘There had never been a pregnant candidate in a general election before, let alone in the heightened atmosphere of a ...”

“... and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social ...”

“... is the ‘Lake Taupo’. He has been assigned to guard it with his life. The stamp has a caramel brown frame, with ‘New Zealand’ at the top, ‘Postage Revenue’ and ‘4d Four Pence 4d’ at the bottom. In the centre is a circular vignette in blue depicting New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau, Lake Taupo and Mount Ruapehu, with two palm trees in ...”

“... is the titular character of Enola Holmes (on Netflix), directed by Harry Bradbeer and adapted by Jack Thorne from a novel by Nancy Springer. Springer has written more than fifty books for young adults, going some way towards confirming that this category often has nothing to do with the age of the reader, and means only that the writing is better than a lot ...”

“... Jack ‘did a Jack’ and missed our father’s funeral. He had taken his new girl to the Gargoyle Club the night before and had woken with such a monumental hangover that the train had left Paddington before he was out of bed. Explaining this to my mother on the telephone later in the day, he had boasted not only about the hangover but also about the new girl, who was just seventeen and had a marvellous figure – almost like a boy’s ...”

“... Man Who Would Be King’, which like all Kipling’s early tales made a great impression on Jack London. His own version, ‘An Odyssey of the North’, concerns an Aleutian Indian whose betrothed is stolen from him by a Norwegian seal poacher, a giant with a golden mane and the blood of the Vikings, much the same as the hero of Kipling’s story, and ...”