“... and a liaison officer in the invasion of Southern France’. A little later, the Ambassador, Duff Cooper, declared that he was ‘extremely anxious to have him’, so Ayer became ‘a diplomat in Paris’, where he met everybody – Bataille, Artaud, Leiris, Giacometti, Tzara and so on. He had some affairs and developed an interest in Existentialism which ...”

“... the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. Edward asked him to undertake the job because they had both been collectors of Surrealism. Edward had been a collector of Dali and Magritte on a scale that can be called patronage; George made a faultless selection of Magrittes from ...”

“... be filled. The Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, had fallen out with his court minstrel, Thomas Cooper, who kept asking embarrassing questions about the alleged mismanagement of funds, when Jones’s Chartist Songs and Fugitive Pieces appeared late in 1846. Some of these, for all their dramatic gestures, had real force. On the lealands slept the ...”

“... consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader. John Rentoul recently wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that ...”

“... they tried to discuss postwar domestic reconstruction, or from the Tories Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, who told him that after the war Britain would find the leadership of Europe there for the taking. Over five years, Churchill’s abilities as a strategist were tested and he sometimes failed, but he was triumphantly successful in creating a narrative, the ...”

“... Years later they could still recite the words of the Eton Boating Song and passages from John Evelyn’s account of the Great Fire of London. Caribbean schoolchildren knew that the best commodities were English, from medicines and neckties to crown-embossed mustard jars and the brilliantine which they applied so liberally to their hair. Caribbean ...”

“... the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John Conolly, to institute a system of humanitarian care for their patients. After these early steps away from the cruel and barbarous treatment of the mad of the preceding centuries, the medical profession began the process of putting the treatment of the mental ...”

“... the clip and gather the leftover scraps. Once the wool was off, it needed to be washed. Christine Cooper had to cull ‘about seven todds of very coarse and feeble tarry’ wool from tegs, scouring off the tar and sorting it for carding. The wool wasted in the process was called ‘twickings’ – another chance for the gleaners. Once carded and the fibres ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...”

“... I seem to think best in collision with other people’s thoughts. In a biography of Lady Diana Cooper, once said to be the most beautiful woman in England and by many accounts one of the most wittily charming, I read a snippet from one of Lady Diana’s letters to a friend: It’s not my nature to be quiet. I have no wealth within me. All stimulus has to ...”

“... the prevailing condition of interdependence across the modern world. Neil MacCormick’s father, John, was the principal begetter of the SNP, from which he became estranged during the Second World War. At the queen’s accession MacCormick senior, still a leading nationalist but operating outside the ranks of the SNP, instigated the legal proceedings ...”

“... full of telling statistics and shot through with the vivid recollections of Barbara Cartland, Duff Cooper and other unconventional ‘native informants’, it attempts to drive a stake through the heart of the Orwellian orthodoxy once and for all. The account begins, appropriately, with the much less catastrophic story historians now tell of British economic ...”

“... description of former slaves ‘unexpectedly standing’ at the helm of a ship after an uprising; John Berry’s strange and lurid film Tamango, starring Dorothy Dandridge; and the Senegalese novelist Boris Boubacar Diop’s playful metafiction Le Temps de Tamango. Mérimée ‘does not simply ignore abolitionism; he actively negates it’, Miller ...”

“... Elizabeth II in Scotland, where there had never been an Elizabeth I – the Scottish judge Lord Cooper made the controversial pronouncement that the unlimited sovereignty of parliament was an exclusively English concept, which had no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law. Cooper’s unconventional insight, when ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”