“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a dictator’ and should be impeached. She told an NRA convention that she’d take up her Smith & Wesson against the government ‘should they decide that my rights are no longer important’, and thinks states should be free to nullify federal laws. She is an Agenda 21 conspiracist and believes that George Soros and the United Nations want to move ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Player argue that, having failed to persuade the public and the medical establishment under Margaret Thatcher that the NHS should be turned into a European-style national insurance programme, the advocates of a competitive health market gave up trying to convince the big audience and focused on infiltrating Whitehall’s policymaking centres and the ...”

“... on the highways and byways. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with.’ Or Elizabeth Smith, the Scottish-born wife of a Wicklow landlord: ‘The Irish landlord is in no essential different from the Irish peasant – his superior position has raised him in many points above his labouring countryman but the character of this race is common to ...”

“... with the nearest thing the Party had to a piping hot Gladstonian internationalist, in the form of Margaret Thatcher. As Simms reminds us, she strode up and down at the edge of the fray, incandescent. ‘This is in the heart of Europe,’ she fumed down the telephone to the Mayor of Bihac in 1994, ‘and the lack of effective action has robbed Nato of its ...”

“... and Circumstances’. The assignment had an added appeal: Agee would not be obliged to work with Margaret Bourke-White, Fortune’s staff photographer, whose work he scorned. He wanted Evans, a photographer he knew and admired. The FSA agreed to lend Evans for the project, but retained its rights to whatever pictures he produced.Travelling the backroads of ...”

“... John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC coverage of Northern Ireland.) By the time of her 1983 re-election, she had succeeded in taming Labour ...”

“... of go, a handsome Guard-ee type’, Penelope had ‘the brains’. Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith, L.P. Hartley were among the Review’s English-language contributors, but stronger indications of Fitzgerald’s inner life and future come from the pieces she wrote, signed and unsigned: about Jarry, Munch, Moravia, Medardo Rosso – the Italian interest ...”

“... the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this when her narrow foot was measured – size five and a half, but the left slightly longer than the right – though she understood that she would no longer be ...”

“... Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing ...”

“... A few months alter the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the most original thinker of post-war Conservatism died. Perhaps partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the philosopher’s papers, without so much as mentioning his political ideas ...”