“... agitation not unlike Tom Mann’s. Harry heard them all – Hyndman, MacLean, Grayson, Wheatley, Cook, Maxton, Bevan, Pollitt – yes, even MacDonald. ‘None of them was a patch on Tom Mann,’ he would say. He described a meeting in Mansfield in which Mann ridiculed the Parliamentary aspirations of the day. ‘He fell on his knees on the front of the ...”

“... prostitutes and Nobel laureates. On one occasion Sean comes home from school to find that ‘the cook and the housekeeper – in French maids’ uniforms – had joined the table for lunch with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. (Said Mom: “They were the perfect people to talk with domestic workers about the difficulty of working in someone else’s ...”

“... stiff competition. Levi in his bibliography does not bother to mention studies by Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, Joanna Richardson and Susan Chitty, among others. He does, however, pay his warm respects to Vivien Noakes’s definitive Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, reissued 1985). Noakes has reviewed Levi’s book – ‘a joyous ...”

“... panoramas and theatrical reconstructions. Napoleon’s captured carriage was put on display at John Sainsbury’s Napoleon Museum in Piccadilly. Marengo, his horse, followed several years later, going on show in Pall Mall in 1823 before being put out to stud. On his deathbed, Napoleon even feared that his corpse would be exhibited in Westminster Abbey, but ...”

“... is up to his successor to keep on with the tablets.’ That successor, in October 1993, was still John Smith; so it was a pre-Blair perspective that led me to conclude: ‘If a “labour party” did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent it. But a social democratic party known as the Labour Party, with an unstitched leadership, is more necessary than ...”

“... the weeks leading up to their separation in 1820, eighteen of his servants – including the cook, the maids and two carpenters – were employed to listen at doors. That summer, when Teresa wasn’t supposed to be seeing Byron, Guiccioli’s spies reported secret rendezvous at the palace after dark, Teresa dressed in black or disguised as a servant. We ...”

“... Irish, many of them young women. Among its employees was my grandfather Sean (known in Britain as John), who drove a District Line train until ill-health forced him to retire in the 1970s. Irish muscle was most useful to the expanding building trade, reviving the clichéd image of the Irish navvy. The Irish were good workers who took pride in the belief that ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... chocolate and the birds’ claw omelettes which had been served up at Il Palmerino by a whimsical cook. She turned down both this overture and the next, while remaining an admiring and respectful friend. It may, nevertheless, have been her memory of Paget’s demanding nature which caused her, in 1915, to attempt the rescue of the latest female recruit, Irene ...”

“... even though he was already engaged to the beautiful 18-year-old Elaine Orr, whom John Dos Passos described as a ‘poet’s dream’ and about whom Cummings would write hundreds of poems. Thayer was less annoyed, it seems, at losing Vivien than at Eliot’s sense of superiority. He compared Eliot the critic to a father punishing a naughty ...”

“... It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book. It is generally thought niggardly or envious to complain about a writer’s abundance (a book a year, roughly, in Updike’s case). Most novelists, it is said, would pant to exhibit such a fault. Or the case is made that it is otiose to complain about the mediocre books when there are so many fine ones; the odd truancy in a record of such inspired application is inevitable, the waterfall has its chilly underside and so on ...”

“... United Mine Workers of America. He joined the union and his wife hung a portrait of its president, John L. Lewis, above her piano. But the Turners, like other Black families in town, were used by mine supervisors to destroy the solidarity between miners, in an attempt to break the union. The UMWA had been integrated since its founding in 1890 and in parts of ...”

“... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...”

“... classicus in the study of computing, robotics and futurism, and is discussed at length in both John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines and Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over.2 Watson won, easily. Its performance wasn’t perfect: it thought Toronto was in the US, and when asked about a word with the double meaning ‘stylish elegance, or students who all ...”

“... clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off … This is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how ...”