“... Allen, who admired both Froude and Seebohm, never wrote the book we wanted. In 1923, Preserved Smith, whose father had been suspended from his American Presbyterian ministry for promoting historical Biblical criticism, also began from the premise that modern European civilisation sprang from the Reformation, which was an improvement on the ...”

“... the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way through the press conference ...”

“... stayed with her while his Notting Hill base was redesigned. Her husband, Sir Charles Powell, was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser. One of Powell’s brothers, Jonathan, is Tony Blair’s chief of staff; a second, Chris, manages the Labour advertising account. Mandelson is friends with Tory MPs; Prince Charles; Drue Heinz; Linda Wachner, an ...”

“... pastime, an excuse for gossip and the indulgence of forbidden fantasies. No one, not even Margaret Cleveland, his wife, the only character whose interest in her husband’s behaviour is more than merely idle (though not much more), ever imagines that Francis has any freedom actually to do anything about his passion. As Miss Maude Doggett, his ...”

“... like Friedrich Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society and later, in the UK, through Madsen Pirie’s Adam Smith Institute, and adopted as policy by Thatcher from the mid-1970s onwards. He persists in using the term ‘establishment’ mainly as a way of shaming neoliberals who like to present themselves as in some way ‘anti-establishment’. Although he rightly ...”

“... particular whims and inclinations, and by stamping on rivals who may be getting above themselves. Margaret Thatcher was such a prime minister, but so too was Edward Heath, perhaps to an even greater extent (Heath’s cabinet was composed almost entirely of admirers and minions), which goes to show that dominance does not automatically translate into ...”

“... was bafflingly absent in private. ‘He is by turns pensive, nervous, mercurial and polite,’ Margaret Case Harriman wrote in a New Yorker profile in 1940. ‘At other times his air of boredom verges on the spectacular.’ Even though ‘Porter did not fit easily into the social mould of a Yale man,’ as his college friend Gerald Murphy put it, by the ...”

“... afford it. You see, if we don’t rehearse, and if we don’t-a play, that runs into money. Margaret Dumont, most imperturbable of straight men, was the aristocratic foil to all the boys in Animal Crackers, and when the circus of Harpo reeled around her, or poked her with a stick, or got his foot caught in her sleeve, Dumont’s suffering was ...”

“... and individuals from fools and rogues, so that credit could be given where it was due: to George Smith for instance, as the ‘godfather to Esmond’, saving Thackeray from the scatty habits he lapsed into when he wrote for serialisation, and providing support for the more measured creation of an elegiac masterpiece. In the new Companion the half-dozen ...”

“... of land from state to private ownership is the biggest of the privatisations that began under Margaret Thatcher and have continued under every administration since, dwarfing in both scope and value the more prominent sales of utilities such as gas, electricity and water, or social housing under the Right to Buy scheme, or nationalised industries such as ...”

“... They were the first two characters established by the creators of the show, Tony Holland and Julia Smith (Ethel was based on a woman Holland met in a pub in Hackney). On Boxing Day 1988, seven million people watched ‘Civvy Street’, a prequel to the show that provides a backstory for all the main characters who were alive in 1942. This was where the ...”

“... Second Sex, the English translation, by H.M. Parshley, did not become an issue until 1983, when Margaret Simons, a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, drew attention to it in her essay, ‘The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir’. Beauvoir had offered Parshley no help; she was already hard at work on The Mandarins before ...”

“... process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to reward friends, bless strangers and settle old scores’. On his last day in office, 20 January 2001, Clinton signed pardon warrants for 141 individuals and commuted the sentences of another ...”

“... potential of working-class politics was easily felt in a period bookended by Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. In this hostile climate, Marxist historical scholarship experienced what Stedman Jones later called an ‘abrupt and terminal decline’. Reconstructing social totalities increasingly seemed a chimerical enterprise, and his earlier confidence ...”

“... he was handsome, and the queen’s feelings about him were easily apparent to one of her women, Margaret Morton, who ‘first suspected the queen at Hatfield when the queen looked out at her privy chamber window at Mr Culpepper’. We all know those looks. Catherine was a poor risk for this sort of game. Culpepper was a little thug to whom Jane owed ...”