“... as Haig, Shultz, Weinberger and Casey, while Ed Meese and Larry Speakes gave imitations of John Mitchell and Ron Ziegler which had all but the cognoscenti fooled. This time, however, there were no residual concessions to the Eastern Establishment – no Harvard professors like Kissinger (indeed, virtually no eggheads or Jews), and this time the constraints ...”

“... him and so did everyone else.’ Who were the Dutch to presume to tell the British what to do? Sir Leslie Rowan of the Treasury prophesied cheerfully that the Messina Six would fall apart, which is what virtually the entire Whitehall machine prayed for. In vain did Russell Bretherton from the Board of Trade, our sole representative at Messina, desperately ...”

“... Geoffrey Townsend, the landscape architects Ivor Cunningham and Michael Brown, and the developer Leslie Bilsby, who commissioned 10 Blackheath Park. Span first became known for Parkleys, an estate in the outer South-West London suburb of Ham, where its architects displayed their distinctive style: flat roofs, huge windows, open plans, carefully maintained ...”

“... first poet of international significance) may be checked against a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard Pennington. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies did take the part of Etain in Rutland Boughton’s opera, The Immortal Hour in 1922, with Peter Shelving’s designs, and since she also acted in a play called Spring Tide which opened at ...”

“... and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by many as the American master of the ...”

“... for example, and centrally, Gillian’s decision at sixteen to change her surname from that of Leslie Stone, her ‘strict … stern’ biological father, to that of Irving Rose, the ‘kind, equanimous, humorous’ Irishman her mother married next; the fabulously ‘over-ripe’ interpretation she develops, the Rock of Zion and the Romance of the ...”