“... Coward’s reputation in the theatre became such that he had to assure nervous callers to his home: ‘I shan’t jump on you. I’m not the type,’ along with an assurance that there was a police station just across the road. Anxious about his mannerisms, he asked Marlene Dietrich to keep an eye on them: ‘I must not appear effeminate in any way. Do be ...”

“... the peace and destroying the good order of the community.’ This was in 1771. Five years later Lord North, who, though not perhaps a figure of the most shining merit, had certainly been ‘soiled’ by much journalistic obloquy, increased the tax on paper by 50 and on advertisements by 100 per cent. Pitt put it up even more. In the first half of the 19th ...”

“... 1966-7, but were completely cleared after arduous investigation, a conclusion fully endorsed by Lord Trend’s inquiry in 1974. Successive chapters then deal with Hollis’s life at Oxford and in China until he entered MI 5 in 1938, with his career there until 1950, and with his unexpected promotion to director-general following the Commander Crabb ...”

“... have derived from what is generally agreed to be a bad and corrupt text, put out by the third Lord Holland in 1822. Carlyle, in a note to Frederick the Great, was one of the first to heap opprobrium on Holland: ‘a book unedited; little but long ignorances of a hopeless type’. Matters were not made easier by Walpole’s complicated instructions from ...”

“... land. The insoluble grief. Not that there’s anything to be done about any of it. Doris died, at home, not long after Peter. She caught an infection, and was left unmedicated as she had wished. We got her a hospital bed and the local palliative care team looked after her. She became increasingly comatose until she stopped breathing one morning and was ...”

“... and trains were cancelled all over the place, to the mounting fury of all those supposedly Tory Home Counties commuters. The prospect of Stagecoach slashing services and bashing unions on the London Underground nailed up the coffins of many London Tory MPs, including Sir George’s. Or was it the announcement the following week that everybody’s pension ...”

“... coronavirus updates. Jacqui Smith, the new minister for higher education, became the first female home secretary in 2007, but has not been a member of Parliament since 2010. James Timpson, the new minister for prisons, ran the high street cobblers of the same name, which is known for employing ex-offenders. Less well known are David Hanson, minister of state ...”

“... at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed at the Spears home in Berkshire. He and Michael Spears had a long talk, just the two of them. De Gaulle, Michael’s mother wrote, ‘talked to Michael for an hour about Oxford and the young men of England, and when he went back to London, Michael, who is a very reserved ...”

“... end up with Waugh in Abyssinia, providing the model for William Boot. Anyone who remembers how, on Lord Copper’s orders, Boot is outfitted with all manner of absurd and elaborate equipment before setting out for the war, will be delighted to read of the Post’s determination to fit Deedes out with cedarwood trunks (lined with zinc to repel ants), solar ...”

“... had radio licences, which meant the BBC had an audience of around 34 million who listened at home and several million more who listened in neighbours’ houses or in pubs and clubs. In a UK population that then stood at 48 million, almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were ...”

“... 103 Alone at home, I’m working in the yard, sun-warmed, a breeze off the coast, the farmer from over the road laying waste to his fields, loam gone to dust in the heat; I can see it gusting away. He’s lived like this for years, friendless and hard in the artery, heart ...”

“... noxious experimental liquid that his species had developed on a planet safely distant from its own home. Still, the firm is clear about the evidence. The DNA of the dead people in this distant place – there are many dead people, and they get to run around a bit as holograms apart from being dissected in a lab – is the same as ours. If they are not our ...”

“... force whose accountability to anyone was difficult to discern. This unease is enhanced when a Home Secretary as relatively hard-line as Leon Brittan is shouted down, as he was recently at the annual conference of the Police Federation; and when one’s own and one’s friends’ children come back from perfectly peaceful demonstrations in Grosvenor Square ...”

“... sometimes do not get on is nothing new. No one reading Giles Hunt’s account of the duel between Lord Castlereagh and George Canning can drive from their imagination the more recent feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, accounts of which made me thankful there are no firearms stored (within easy reach) at Downing Street. Duels are now fought with ...”

“... to apply that knowledge’. Executions both united the several parts of government and rammed home the lesson: ‘Respect private property.’ Hangings therefore represented a conflict ‘of the powerful and the propertied against the weak and the poor’. To a large extent, of course, punishments of crime always do. Crime is largely an activity of the ...”