“... Edwardian countryside, red brick villas behind high beech hedges, looking for Hamstead Marshall. An ancient buttressed wall with a stone panel dated 1665 suggests we are not far off. And here is the church above the road, the tower with an 18th-century look to it and a medieval chapel behind. But it’s locked and no one about who could open it ...”

“... who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the other shall answer God Preserve.’ If the crews really got out of touch they were to leave messages in bottles at pre-assigned beaches or map readings. It helps also, in reading not Cook but ...”

“... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...”

“... for the two or three days work a month that was involved. In due course he became Lord Lawson. George Younger had reportedly not formally disclosed that he was to leave his post as Secretary of State for Defence before it was announced that he was to join the Royal Bank of Scotland and Murray Johnston Trusts. Having been Mrs Thatcher’s staunchest ...”

“... better options, such as an infusion of jobs and investment in the inner cities: the domestic Marshall Plan many black politicians had long championed. Worse, the ‘politics of respectability’, a prim, middle-class tradition of black protest, had led civil rights leaders to turn away in shame and embarrassment from convicts, the ‘most stigmatised ...”

“... of the US state’s political interests, it was a system and a strategy intended to shore up the Marshall Plan, to exercise ‘veto power’ over Japanese imports, and to help control the spread of Communism in Asia. The oil system, unstable and rickety at best, needed constant fine-tuning. When in 1968 the British announced their intention to withdraw ...”

“... days. Reading Keats’s letters in the latter part of 1931, he encountered the journal-letters to George and Georgiana on the Western frontier of the United States. Eliot earmarked Keats’s strategies: ‘These are trifles – but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are ...”

“... in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered ...”

“... of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the George-Bushian sense) have been losing ground in Iran. The Presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani were a slow-motion Thermidor. Since Muhammad Khatami was elected President in a landslide in 1997, Iran has stumbled towards accommodation, first with the Arab ...”

“... there’s every chance we’ll get more of that, not less. Instead of telling people this, George Osborne threatened them with punitive tax hikes if they voted to Leave, a gesture pretty much guaranteed to trigger the big ‘Up Yours’. It also didn’t help that Corbyn didn’t seem able to endorse his party’s line without also slagging off the ...”

“... committed on both sides. In Britain, the debacle of his protégé brought the rule of Lloyd George to an end. Philhellene to the last, when he threatened to take the country to war over Turkish successes in October 1922, he was ousted by a revolt in the Carlton Club. The following summer Curzon, abandoning earlier Entente schemes for a partition of ...”

“... to the military rank of marshal: unsuspecting of his madness, some customers addressed him as Mr Marshall. There were two branches, a shop run by my mother dealing in silver, mostly Georgian, and one run by my father dealing in miscellaneous antiques and bric-à-brac. She revelled in her job, especially the buying, which she did with a lot of taste. She was ...”

“... still carries a scar from where one guy stuck a screwdriver into him. The band bought the first Marshall stacks in Leicester and blew everyone’s ears off. They wore make-up and got clothes from fans who worked at a theatrical costume hire shop. They wore their mod hair like crash helmets, with full fringes and luxuriant sideburns. They hid their ...”