“... any other family, in all probability. Orton grasped this but exaggerated his insight. In What the butler saw, Dr Prentice attempts to seduce his new secretary, Geraldine. Mrs Prentice has actually succeeded with Nick, the page-boy at the Station Hotel. Not that it matters (since the play is the theatrical equivalent of pure mathematics), Geraldine and Nick ...”

“... formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s rights activists and working-class representatives, sharing a platform with William Morris. He supported improving the lives of labouring Britons, while educating his audiences ...”

“... men than me have meant less.’ So it’s possible to see how commissioning a Marlowe novel from John Banville, whose agent represents the Chandler estate too, might have struck all the parties involved as an inspired piece of stunt casting. A disciple of Proust, Nabokov and Beckett, an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”

“... for figurative language is a feature of his style, and also a pointer to his critical interests. John Ashbery’s poetry is said to be ‘like an electrotherapy relieving the stiff neck of the sublime, and helping our numbness to speak’. Does our cultural plight put us in a madhouse or a massage parlour here? Hartman is thinking about his style, not our ...”

“... is that of Walter Bagehot, the Victorian journalist and banker, still believed in by Mr St John-Stevas. She even refers in more than one place to ‘St Bagehot’, which I fear reflects the uncritical adoration this smart performer received in academic quarters in the Packenhams’ youth. The essence of Bagehot’s view is that the Queen is merely an ...”

“... undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of Bishop Joseph Butler, later assisted by the Rev. William Paley’s Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. According to Paley, the infinite presence, wisdom and benevolence of God were attested to by all living things, from the minutest ...”

“... grandson Matthew Yorke, and rounded off with a touching if too brief memoir by Sebastian Yorke. John Updike contributes a gracefully enthusiastic introduction. For Green, writing fiction was so demanding – partly because he could only work at it in the evenings and at weekends, and partly because he rewrote so much – that it’s not surprising that he ...”

“... and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but ...”

“... biographies (of the queen and Princess Diana). Junor, however, is a career journalist, daughter of John Junor, the former editor in chief of the Sunday Express, and she is much closer to her material. She has written two lives of Charles and one each of Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, as well as a group portrait of ‘the troubled life of the House of ...”

“... the House of Commons Defence Committee that Iran was capable of producing biological weapons. The Butler Report on UK intelligence about WMD, published in July 2004, told us nothing about Iran’s biological warfare capabilities. They didn’t feature in Goss’s speech on ‘Global Intelligence Challenges 2005’, and ...”

“... into close political habitation’. Tory canonisation, she argues, came late. In 1914 Geoffrey Butler – uncle of the future Tory grandee, Rab – published The Tory Tradition: Bolingbroke, Burke, Disraeli and Salisbury. Fears that New Liberals (unconstrained by Whiggish caution) and Irish Home Rulers were set on ‘Jacobinical destruction of the British ...”

“... not far from the President’s House, the third presidential mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived, and a tourist destination for those who don’t leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the ...”

“... father, Lionel, a leading banker and industrialist whose own father had been Gordon Selfridge’s butler. Robert seemed a thorough aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of ...”