“... history held in the ‘golden age’ by Trevor-Roper, or Cambridge by appointing Quentin Skinner, Richard J. Evans and Christopher Clark (all distinctly uncowed characters) to the chair held by Herbert Butterfield. The massive expansion of universities in the 1990s and 2000s did change the ancient universities, but mostly by integrating them into the wider ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... thirty years, over which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its supposedly utopian ...”

“... Unsurprisingly, this left my mother perpetually anxious lest we catch it. Mrs Sherwood was a good cook and often invited my brother and me to sample her dishes, which we were strictly forbidden to do. On one occasion, though, I succumbed (Yorkshire pudding) and foolishly saying so at home it was as if I’d signed my own death warrant.TB was to blame for ...”

“... eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... who go around in little motorised wheelchairs? He’s got them working on a production line. The cook is epileptic. The gardener has only one arm, pretty handy for using the shears. His private secretary is blind … As for you, you must know yourself.’This caricature of the deformed nature of labour under capitalism becomes the axis of the plot. Hartog ...”

“... who let her into their homes. (Wisely, Rose serves her only biscuits and tea. I would sooner cook for Michael Winner.) Having written famously before of the way most people babble like narcissistic fools in front of a reporter, she gives Rose ‘a score of 99’ in conducting oneself with a journalist.After their meeting, guarded and wary on both ...”

“... fingernails. Laura is more enigmatic. Writing last year in Feminist Studies, Blanche Wiesen Cook explained that Laura is a ‘barely disguised’ picture of Eleanor Roosevelt: a plausible notion, given Eleanor Roosevelt’s success – both social and academic – at the Wimbledon school and the praise she attracted from Marie Souvestre for the ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... Gasp at the scale model. Blush at the hubris of the promotional displays. Giant blow-ups of ‘Richard Rogers’s original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... chichi, Bobo enclaves. There are other extra-textual resonances: the Maigrets live on boulevard Richard-Lenoir – around the corner from the Bataclan concert hall, which was to become world famous in the attacks of 2015. The desperate, vulnerable, weak, politically radicalised perpetrators of those recent crimes were well within Simenon’s ...”

“... to provide such posthumous attestations of one another’s genius. It happened when Peter Cook died and with the same maudlin affection. ‘Dear Cooky’, ‘Dear Spike’. The necessary element of suffering, the cost always sought for in the deaths of comics, and which in Peter’s case came with the drink, is here supplied by mental illness (‘No ...”