“... never far away and there’s a persistently jeering note perhaps bred by the habit of contention. David Starkey sneers, too, but I feel this is more cosmetic. None of this posing, though, is altogether new. A.J.P. Taylor was its original exponent, certainly on television, and was every bit as pleased with himself as the new breed of history boys. Still with ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”