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“... as a follower first of the earls of Ulster and then of the earls of Chester, and finally of the King. He was a royalist captain I215-16 and rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in 1270. Two of his sons had ...”

“... Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing ...”

“... about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple goose-pimpled legs of English women in miniskirts. She wrote about air raids and ...”

“... inevitable fixture that it can accommodate the most disparate material. Here is section 175: Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was Henry He called for his butts – he called for his bowl – he called for his fiddlers three in vain. Blank prose took hold of Henry’s soul considering all the deaths and considering. There is a little ...”

“... of the black African leaders, however, was the Kabaka of Buganda: ‘He regarded himself as a King and he regarded me as a hireling of the Queen. And he didn’t really think he ought to talk to me. He thought he ought to speak to the Queen ... I have dealt with some of the most stubborn trade union leaders in this country and ... some of the most ...”

“... and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he renamed after his wife, Beatrice) that he buzzed Balmoral Castle. Pickens talked like his name sounded, describing the head of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), Sir Frank Kearton, as ...”

“... spin doctor, as a political consultant to write hymns in praise of his once and future king in the leader columns. The paper was repeating a giddy pattern set in the autumn. On 28 October Matthew Parris, the politician turned journalist, said in passing to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that Mandelson was gay. He wasn’t breaking a confidence: the ...”

“... said irritably that the Liberal press was written ‘by boobies for boobies’. Lady Lilias Margaret Bathurst, proprietor of the Morning Post, told her editor that ‘the public are marvellously ignorant and will swallow anything.’ The outbreak of war accelerated the breakup of old relationships and patterns of press behaviour. On the one hand, the ...”

“... work of women imaginative writers.’ So into the witness-box come successively Edna O’Brien, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. In the case of three, perhaps four, of the witnesses nothing is said about how they give their evidence. In the two years that Rebecca West was contributing to the Clarion, 1912 and 1913, she ...”

“... become editor of the union newspaper, the Miner, a post which entailed membership of the court of King Arthur at his Sheffield Camelot. Routledge was spurned in 1983; it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that ...”

“... standards in public life, a member of the Commission, MacGregor’s former cabinet colleague Tom King, signalled his approach to MacGregor’s conduct with the memorable sentence: ‘I will embarrass you now by saying I always thought you should be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ MacGregor’s antics were governed by the prevailing Parliamentary ethic during ...”

“... male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous interpretations, affects and ...”

“... he said, became ‘my true religion’. A tempestuous first marriage to the feminist writer Margaret Walters – over which his book casts a benevolent un-real light – sent him first into hiding in North London and finally back to America, where he fell in love, married and, in his late sixties, became a father for the first time. A few months before ...”

“... anxious consultation with the queen about the difficulty of finding a second husband for Princess Margaret and at another accompanying Idi Amin on the viola, enjoying his ‘light tenor’ in a selection of parlour ballads. The atmosphere of the Diary cast an aura of wild improbability over even such presumably real events as a press reception for the English ...”

“... was bafflingly absent in private. ‘He is by turns pensive, nervous, mercurial and polite,’ Margaret Case Harriman wrote in a New Yorker profile in 1940. ‘At other times his air of boredom verges on the spectacular.’ Even though ‘Porter did not fit easily into the social mould of a Yale man,’ as his college friend Gerald Murphy put it, by the ...”