“... probably never took to the air.4 ‘What comes to mind,’ Sutherland writes, ‘is the raving George IV on his deathbed, convinced he had fought gallantly at the Battle of Waterloo … In 1943, sending a good-luck charm to a young relative who was training with the RAF, Faulkner said he would have liked to have sent his dog tags: “but I lost them in ...”

“... if there was a nuclear war. And I think if a nuclear war did happen I’d be thinking: Is Boy George safe? . . . I remember when ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ first came out. I saw him leaving a club one night and I ran up to meet him. I bent down in front of the car to talk to him and as he talked he held my hand for a little while. Afterwards I ...”

“... and holes torn in the knees of their jeans. Most ludicrous Londonism of all is a 1972 claim about George Best: ‘Though he lives in Manchester, he was, and still remains, a swinging Londoner.’ The book has a marked reluctance to include groups who’ve developed outside London (there’s no space for U2 or Massive Attack, Joy Division or Led Zeppelin). Nor ...”

“... other panaceas were naive or faddish, for example the enthusiasm of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley for the health benefits of tar-water. The phenomenon of projection is parodied by Berkeley’s fellow Anglo-Irishman Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where projectors at the Academy of Lagado devise schemes for extracting sunbeams ...”

“... and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe sticks out of his sock. The Guardian compilation reminds readers how high expectations were when Brown took over. ‘Master ...”

“... history’ of Edda and saga, perhaps especially in England though more ominously elsewhere. Andrew Wawn prefaces his collection with a 19th-century sketch of the great translator Sir George Webbe Dasent: Of Herculean height and strength ... he resembled a Viking of old, and such I conceive he at times supposed ...”

“... Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one. Astronaut Scott shoves ...”

“... of the giants wasn’t really there. That changed with the voyages of Vitus Bering, James Cook and George Vancouver, who between 1728 and 1794 mapped out most of the west coast of Canada and Alaska. They were looking for a strait and an inland sea supposedly discovered by Juan de Fuca and Bartholomew de Fonte in 1592 and 1640. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... Andrew Lang​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire ...”

“... after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all the resources in the world,’ Neil wrote, ‘but if you don’t understand what really makes the Spectator tick then they will be as naught’ (the two had ...”

“... In his 2006 book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, the British historian Andrew Roberts writes: ‘Just as in science fiction people are able to live on through cryogenic freezing after their bodies die, so British post-imperial greatness has been preserved and fostered through its incorporation into the American world-historical ...”

“... which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.’ Pincher describes the comparison as ‘my most cherished ...”

“... therefore come to be seen as a watershed. With the Cold War over and the Gulf War won, President George Bush and James Baker, his Secretary of State, have adopted an attitude which the Israelis find so alarmingly even-handed that they have begun to suspect another sort of conspiracy, this time concocted by pro-Arab Texas oilmen. Bush says in private that ...”

“... kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in Dublin. The tone is oddly like that of someone who is eager to reassure an older sister of his orthodox sexual ...”

“... Katie Roiphe was writing a piece about it for Harper’s. Twenty years ago, when I worked for George magazine, I’d commissioned Roiphe to write about the report written by Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who had presided over the investigations into what had gone on in the Clinton White House – Lewinsky, Whitewater, Travelgate etc. Moira ...”