“... as ‘apprentices’. Dawkins Pennant put some of this money into building Penrhyn Castle as a neo-Norman fantasia, but though a large sum at the time, it paled in comparison to the riches he and his forebears had accumulated during their decades of slave ownership. His fortune at his death in 1840 was an estimated £600,000. By the end of the 19th ...”

“... interest is the section where Atlas gives a draft of the work in progress to the social scientist Edward Shils – a long-time colleague and frenemy of Bellow’s at the University of Chicago – to vet for errors, misemphases, solecisms and overall tone and conditioning, much as the critic Dwight Macdonald had served as the gruff, avuncular sounding board ...”

“... significant expression, often in the apocalyptic idiom constructed for the purpose and explored in Norman Cohn’s works. (Aldous Huxley, in Overy’s quotation, sees ‘Belial’s guiding hand’ in modern history.) There are good reasons in European history why the sense that ‘we’ – however defined – feel under threat from outside enemies or inner ...”

“... to recognise the historical inevitability of partition. Townshend fits in a discussion of the Norman Conquest of Ireland in the 1170s, telling us that ‘the roots of the Home Rule crisis’ can be found in the ‘original connection between the two main “British Isles”’. He fast forwards to the Cromwellian conquest of 1649-53, which ‘fixed in ...”

“... a more scorching erasure. Discrediting, and if possible disavowing, the prime ministership of Edward Heath was one of the earliest tasks of the Thatcherite project. It was what gave coherence to an otherwise confused and erratic new leadership. The leader knew what she detested long before she knew what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of ...”

“... of the Government trying to wriggle out of any responsibility is especially interesting. (Norman Tebbit cuts an unedifying figure in both this and the Lloyd’s book.) The Barlow Clowes investors cleverly organised themselves into a political lobby, keeping up the pressure on their constituency MPs, who then kept up the pressure on the Government, as ...”

“... while I was still working on my thesis, I’d had an unsuccessful interview in Washington with Edward Teller, who was recruiting for Livermore. He made an odd comment about preferring physics to politics. It was only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know ...”

“... like Major. (There are photos of his father, Tom, looking like a cross between George Formby and Norman Wisdom, in the book.) What his parents did bequeath him, however, was a consuming interest in popular entertainment, which this lucid, erudite study distils to excellent effect. An impressive amount of research underpins the volume, though Major conceals ...”

“... thinking drove Thatcher through the vicious recession of the early 1980s. It was encapsulated by Norman Tebbit in his conference speech in 1981, often misquoted: ‘I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ That would imply that economic hardship should ...”

“... in their discovery of the unpublished memoirs of the English showman who first exhibited him. Tom Norman, it turns out, was something of a magnate in these lower depths of the trade: he had more than a dozen freak and waxwork shows moving from one grimy location to another in greater London. Within four years, however, the police powers of the newly-formed ...”

“... of documentary sources – and yet assessments of his ingenuity have changed considerably. Norman Blake, a recent biographer, remarks bluntly that ‘he was no scholar and his interest in literature was probably superficial … he was a man of the late medieval period, not of the Renaissance.’ This is a little unfair. Caxton’s early interest in ...”

“... texts, informed asides about ‘pastoral’, and a final jump – through the paper hoop of Norman Mailer’s ‘faction’ – into the company of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger. One of his propositions is that ‘as far as the intellectuals are concerned, the prophecy that a literature of the West would emerge to liberate America from European and ...”

“... More recently, there was of course the flagellatrice who had managed to rent herself space in Norman Lamont’s capacious, not to say elastic, basement. However, I note that the winsome Tony Blair, who is not about to be outdone on any sector of the law-and-order front, has recently stood up before the whole school and bared his reminiscences. On a recent ...”

“... In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while ...”

“... but despite the rollcall of topics Murray reminded him that they had discussed – ‘Street, Norman Shaw, a volume of topography articles, an Approach to Victorian Architecture, the next volume of memoirs’ – none was forthcoming. ‘William Hickey’ in the Daily Express foresaw Betjeman’s likely role as poet laureate and commissioned him to write ...”