“... will simultaneously become convinced that their daughter ‘looks like’ a Joanna or a Niamh. P.G. Wodehouse apparently took the name Jeeves from a Warwickshire cricketer. Did the name sound right for a valet simply because it rhymes with ‘sleeves’? Wodehouse became rich by sounding ultra-British to an American readership. Perhaps ‘Jeeves’ so well ...”

“... for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to ...”

“... evidence of the Hills’ reliability.The UFO Incident, a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was reported ...”

“... and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and D.A.N. Jones, later of the LRB, walked out. We’d lost the editor. I was asked to take over and with designer Robin Fior looking over my shoulder I wrote: we shall fight, we will win: Paris, London, Rome, Berlin. The vote was unanimous. We were for Utopia. To raise ...”

“... drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the ...”

“... the forgotten multitudes resurrected by Parker are some appealing characters. I especially enjoyed PC Butcher, one of two plainclothes constables who gave extended evidence to the committee about activity in men’s toilets in Mayfair and Soho. They provide a description of what went on that is unrivalled, in these volumes, by any account by an actual queer ...”

“... that Kennedy’s address to the nation on 22 October 1962 would be an abdication speech, à la Edward VIII, announcing his love for Debo. The Cuban Missile Crisis came as a terrible disappointment. Two years later, when Hons and Rebels topped the bestseller lists alongside Joy Adamson’s Born Free, Diana wrote to the TLS calling it ‘grotesque’, while ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social ...”

“... problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that ...”

“... of Lord Justice O’Connor, whose account of his contacts with the Conservarive Party leader Sir Edward Carson in January 1921 are especially interesting. O’Connor reported that he ‘understood Carson to be in favour of ultimate unity, through the means of the Council of Ireland set up under the Home Rule Act’ and gave details of two further meetings ...”

“... Ancients’, among whom the most gifted, besides Palmer, were George Richmond and Edward Calvert. Shoreham for the Ancients functioned as, in Henry James’s phrase, ‘the Great Good Place’ – ‘a valley so hidden,’ Calvert said, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out.’ The Shoreham spirit that emerges from the ...”

“... part of a verse of the Old Hundredth (the name Waugh gave to one of his fictional night-clubs). Edward FitzGerald chose that verse for his tombstone, well-remembering the 12th-century verse he had translated from the Persian: ‘We are helpless: thou hast made us what we are.’ Henry VI wrote a prayer: Domine Jesu, qui me creasti, redimsti et preordinaste ...”

“... idiom’, is one of the Bulldog Drummonds of the narrative. Along with ‘his great associate’ Edward Thompson, he is ‘a plausible candidate ... for leading hero of the years in which the forward march of consumer individualist values halted at the cliff edge, and the call for different, new, vastly more mutual, altruistic, and less destructive ...”

“... party agree only that it will be determined by the value of a given index, say the Dow Jones Industrial Average, on the day of settlement. Imagine that on the date the promises are made, with the relevant halal shares worth £1000, the Average stands at 8000 points. Then imagine that a year later, the value of the shares has remained the same but ...”