“... identify themselves and give me an instance of their call. As it is, I know the blackbird and the robin but that’s about it. Stopped in the ticket office at King’s Cross yesterday by a Scotsman who I thought wanted to talk to me about Sophie. Which Sophie? I say. Not Sophie at all. He wants a selfie.8 June. I suppose I’ve managed to die, he ...”

“... for the council in 1970 at the age of 22. Ten years later the young politician had put aside his day job as a teacher and was now leader of Sheffield council, a truly astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public transport and geriatric care. (A ...”

“... John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John ...”

“... been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day – ‘Runny’ comes from the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing ...”

“... attempt – betrayed by minor scratches around his stomach – to perform harakiri. Every day brings more news of such deaths ‘in apology’ to the nation’s war widows and bereaved families. What will Ono do? Ishiguro gives a delicate and wholly convincing account of the evasions, the self-justifications and the pride of a man willing to bend with ...”

“... adapted it for the stage and then worked on the screenplay (the film starred Kirk Douglas and Dany Robin). When Hayes returned to the US, he began a new life as a member of the American middle class. A hatchet job on Eugene Lyons, whose book The Red Decade criticised the infatuation of American intellectuals with Stalin in the 1930s, was the final sign of any ...”

“... of Kon Fredericks and Ralph Cooper (the plumber Sir Peter tried so hard to sack) and we think of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck; we cast their boss as the Sheriff of Nottingham, frustrated by merry men. Sir Peter’s diary shows him trying to persuade softer members of the staff to join Nattke in order to outvote the happy band of brothers; another tactic was to ...”

“... then proposes that neurochemistry has shaped the course of human history right up to the present day: ‘What passes for progress in human civilisation,’ he writes, ‘is often nothing more than new developments in the art of changing body chemistry.’ What Smail provides is not another version of the crude evolutionary psychology that has become popular ...”

“... It was said that at Louis XV’s ‘perfumed court’ a different scent was required for every day of the week. It isn’t hard to see the appeal of perfume, especially in smellier times. You would need a lot of essential oils in your nostrils to smother the stink of body odour, sewage and animal waste on an 18th-century street. Perfumes – which were ...”

“... life’ is described as stretching out its ‘steam feeler to this point three or four times a day’ and quickly withdrawing, as if what it found there was ‘uncongenial’. Wessex was where Hardy could stage his feeling for cosmic conservatism; a late formulation appears in ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’, written in 1915, which pits the ...”

“... her name with a hyphen and sometimes doesn’t? Karl Miller loses patience: ‘Dear Hans, every day I find a large accumulation of letters of contention and complaint, addressed to me. Most of them are from you’; then, ‘My head is dizzy with your letters and cards of criticism and rebuke’; and, finally, ‘If you do not like our editorial policies and ...”

“... The rich and titled, then as now, lend themselves best to Diary treatment. The royalty of the day went out of their way to oblige the press, particularly George III’s sons, who between them, as the Duke of Wellington observed, insulted every gentleman in the country. Where modern tabloids found a topic in the Duchess of York’s bottom, cartoonists of ...”

“... in a cinema behind the screen (a woman who was then a little girl remembers what was playing the day they delivered the box: The Road to Bali, Rear Window and Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion), taken to a major’s house, shifted to a colonel’s office. These movements are top secret, but wherever the body goes, candles and flowers ...”

“... Yeats, Eliot, Auden and George Barker. Then, on leaving school, he published a novel, Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing in Zwemmer’s as a schoolboy, he had encountered Surrealism in its ...”

“... Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem, thanks to a Roman census, on a day corresponding to 25 December, at the end of a year corresponding to 1 BC, that all those fireworks, a few weeks ago, were marking his 2000th birthday in a meaningful way, that his mother was a virgin, that he rode into Jerusalem on an ass? Well, I am afraid ...”