“... wildly from the thunder-cloud … and rush, in far-spread disorder, over the spacious face of the hill’.Some of those spectators – perhaps most of them – hadn’t come to see history made but to pick its pocket. O’Keeffe is at his best when he discusses the ancient and apparently ineradicable urge to plunder the dead. Achilles did it; the Bayeux ...”

“... and they certainly strove. Bob cleaned windows during the day and shifted scenery at the Streatham Hill Theatre by night. Eth combined day shifts in a local bakery with evenings as a cinema usherette, and spent Saturday mornings helping out at the headquarters of Freeman’s, the shopping catalogue company. Young Ken had a paper round, but one winter ...”

“... street – and she wanted her picture taken. Two Chinooks were overhead as I made my way to see Peter Crowley, the Unicef representative in Afghanistan. They passed over the compound and disappeared into Camp Phoenix, the American base not far from the airport. The red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with the multiple-passport-wielding aura of ...”

“... reaching back beyond the usual records of animosity and atrocity. Like Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill, bringing home to modern children the origins of the English race in alliance and friendship between the Saxon Hugh and the Norman invader Sir Richard, O’Grady, whose political opinions are mostly unlike Kipling’s, brings home to his infantile though ...”

“... most straightforward method is that of the History of 12th-Century Western Philosophy, edited by Peter Dronke. We just haven’t read all the material, insists Dronke. Enormous amounts of evidence lie hidden in manuscripts, or in bad early editions. The whole network of intellectual relations in the Middle Ages still needs to be charted, strand by ...”

“... exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of ...”

“... before one day Bardens looked out of his fifth-floor office window in Alexandra Palace, on its hill above the North London suburbs, and saw the capital winking and humming to the south. ‘I suddenly thought, “Bugger it,”’ he remembers here, ‘“Panorama, that’s the title.”’ The first edition was a disaster. To make the programme as ...”

“... of Clarissa’s plotting, and from his mixed responses (aloof, defensive, pained) to Aaron Hill, Colley Cibber and other early readers of the novel in manuscript, it’s evident he didn’t always take well to criticism or suggestions for alterations. There must have been something about Bradshaigh that drew him in and kept him writing, long after her ...”

“... first all-night superclub. One of its founders, James Palumbo (the son of Conservative peer Peter Palumbo), occasionally lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson. He even pitched, unsuccessfully, that Ministry be adopted as the corporate sponsor of the Millennium Dome’s Faith Zone, on the grounds that ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... it reminds him of a horse.’ When we got off​ the streetcar at last we had to walk up a steep hill, trying awkwardly to share the weight of the suitcase. The houses were not quite all the same though at first they looked like it. Some of the roofs came down over the walls like caps, or else the whole second storey was like a roof, covered in shingles. The ...”

“... dimple-cheeked deus ex machina Lodge pulls out, with the implacable defiance of a Blue Peter presenter exclaiming, ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier,’ as Ursula is conveniently rewarded with the discovery of a cache of immensely valuable IBM share certificates that pay for her new, improved nursing-home care (and a cool $100,000 left over to ...”

“... met Princess Margaret ... yet?’ At Quentin’s we grew used to finding Koestler, Bernard Levin, Peter Sellers, Ken Tynan, Keith Richards – but none of these quite counted as in her league. As Quentin observes here, with a pretence of puzzlement, ‘even in supposedly relaxed and liberal circles, very few managed to behave normally with ...”

“... 1960 Williams was playing with Fenella Fielding in the revue Pieces of Eight (largely written by Peter Cook) at the Apollo Theatre, and his diary entry for the 27th reads: ‘The show in evening went well, till Madam decided to ad lib one line before the tag in “Spies”. Of course it threw me completely. This is the last straw. I’ve reported it to the ...”

“... into the chalk hills. I vividly recall riding, again with Penelope Betjeman, up to the White Horse Hill on the Berkshire Downs near Uffington at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve; we dismounted, and stood on the eye, and each made a wish. Perhaps, in an older, crueller century, we would have slaughtered our horses instead of riding them home through the sleeping ...”