“... managed to get to America at all. Did Sir Richard Hawkins say his latitude was 48°, three degrees north of where he ought to have been? Then he meant 50° 48' – ‘how so obvious an error got into the text is immaterial.’ He saw a peopled country with many fires? That could easily be the uninhabited Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass ...”

“... of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and Stoke Newington only because her secretary at the film technicians’ union, where she was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting MP, Ernie Roberts, as well as the leader of the local council, who had been all ...”

“... was protective. ‘I shot enough sultry looks round the MGM photo gallery to melt the North Pole.’ Most of Hollywood’s leading men fell for her and she took her pick. She was famously married: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra. Shaw was the cultivated one. He hated her walking round the house in her bare feet and was shocked to discover ...”

“... twenty years between the two wars, he had spent much of his time in an infantry battalion on the North-West Frontier, where, more interested in Indian life than in polo or big game, he had been passed over for promotion. In 1939, at the outbreak of war, he was still a captain, and he owed his rapid promotion to the new attitudes. That our paths ever crossed ...”

“... August, Oxfordshire. We turn off the Burford Road to look again at William Wilcote’s tomb at North Leigh, knowing, though, from our last visit that some well-meaning vicar has desecrated the little masterpiece of a chapel by kitting it out with serpentine-blue upholstered chairs and a garish triptych on the altar – the clergy so often no better ...”

“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served ...”

“... early life that made him the man and writer he was, but of what he found at hand on the North Shore of Long Island between October 1922 and May 1924, when he was living in a comfortable cottage at 6 Gateway Drive and writing in an office above the garage. Scholars have long known that the leading women in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan ...”

“... of industry, the role of the unions, immigration, education, the economic and cultural gap between North and South. Several columnists (on both sides of the political divide) attributed Britain’s recent sporting success to Thatcher’s influence, and the culture of money-oriented competitive individualism that characterised her time in office. The London ...”

“... with deep personal sincerity, and such sincerity will often be one of its causes. Oliver North, for instance, was not a hypocrite in any conventional sense, in that his behaviour was neither primarily self-serving nor inconsistent. It was North’s sincerity that enabled him to subvert the institutions for which he ...”

“... Chief of Staff, has claimed that she influenced the sacking of Reagan’s campaign chairman, John Sears, in 1980; Larry Speakes has argued that she kept Lynn Nofzinger from becoming Press Secretary: while Donald Regan, the former Secretary of the Treasury, has accused her of a host of similar sins, including campaigning for the resignation of William ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and ...”

“... confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in any of the countries he has visited over the past few years – even though he spends summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations ...”

“... addresses his girlfriend as Angel Drawers. In other words, he’s a cross between Keith Talent and John Self, a London yob whose conflict with the South American wilds is bound to produce much mirthful copy and rich scope for fatso-baiting. Stockton certainly lives up to his role, screaming for tomato ketchup in the middle of nowhere, sulking in his ...”

“... author of a much-praised work on Plato pitched his council election campaign on a pledge to get North Oxford’s rubbish bins emptied not twice but three times a week. Would that some ambitious young intellectual in the Crossman mould were launching his political career with a similar pledge in these Thatcherite times. Tam’s relatively short volume is not ...”

“... to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Macmillan became MP for Stockton in 1924. The high unemployment in the North-East between the wars, with its attendant misery, affected Macmillan all his life. He tried hard at the time to improve conditions there and resolved that they should never be permitted to return. Together with the 1914-18 war, Stockton was the strongest ...”