“... privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy Andy’ hardly suggested that the British royal family was in danger from republican zealots. Wagner never attempts to examine the ideological relationship between pornography and politics. He speculates that the sexual atrocities committed against aristocrats ...”

“... television. New names will appear: Clement Greenberg, Alfred Barr, Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon. All but the stodgiest departments – though this exempts many – will make gestures towards what has for the last thirty years been referred to, again tautologically, as ‘Theory’. Somewhere along the line, art history majors with ...”

“... his neighbour Rosie Swan over Christmas 1952, just after he’d put Ethel under the floorboards: Andy Pandy, Flower Pot Men and a festive variety show with Norman Wisdom, Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Petula Clark. Reggie was ‘all nerves’, Swan later recalled.Summerscale pauses for a moment, just after Beresford ...”

“... with a sweet, rounded face and kiss curls singing ‘You Made Me Love You’ as a fan letter to Clark Gable, with a scrapbook of his pictures propped in front of her. The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the ...”

“... As recently as six weeks ago, the answer would have been yes, definitely. ‘British politics,’ Andy Beckett wrote in the Guardian last October, ‘feels relentlessly tabloid-dominated. From the daily obsession with immigrants to the rubbishing of human rights lawyers, from the march towards a “hard Brexit” to the smearing of liberal Britons as bad ...”

“... introduced Bacon to collectors and galleries and other painters, even persuading Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, to visit Bacon’s studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show and Sutherland ...”

“... console radio was set up in front of the screen, so that audiences could listen to Amos ’n’ Andy. Welles became a celebrated voice on the March of Time series and the voice of the fabled ‘Shadow’ himself. He was an enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The ...”

“... Crowd comes from 1957: a post-McCarthy production, in which the ‘sponsors’ of Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith in the performance of his life) could be shown as creators and manipulators of a home-grown political evil. The early pages of An Army of Phantoms take us back to a different era and almost a different country. During the last two years of the ...”

“... Bermondsey’s Neil Coyle, took to bombarding Corbyn’s phone with late-night screeds. Andy McDonald, who served in the shadow cabinet, observes that such behaviour ‘would not be tolerated in normal workplaces’, and it was exceptional even in the fractious world of British politics. The party’s new leader agrees that this was a low ...”