“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... all know, basically suck. They are expensive and unreliable and tend to run out of power. Put your foot down in a petrol car, and it goes. Put your foot down in an electric car and it takes you to the end of the road and then conks out. This is known as ‘range anxiety’, and has been the main obstacle to the adoption of ...”

“... mean many things: that someone’s father, perennially out of work for ‘kicking with the wrong foot’, has managed to find a job; that the pop group Mud has gone to number one with ‘Oh Boy’; or, more likely, that there’s been a murder, a beating, a car bomb, a riot, a high-profile trial. ‘A booby-trap bomb that was intended for a British army ...”

“... was known during his long career as ‘Grim Grom’, and in Moscow the joke was that he never set foot in the capital. He was whisked by automobile to and from his apartment or dacha day after day, either to the inner courtyard of the Foreign Ministry to ascend to his office, or to the airport to walk up the steps of the aircraft that was waiting to take him ...”

“... since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like Michael Foot – with Mary Wilson as one of the exceptions. Although I warned the heroine of Mrs Wilson’s Diary that I was a journalist, she favoured me with her political opinions (sound, I thought, if unorthodox) and I changed the subject, asking if she thought it a ...”

“... to Manley, and in the earlier years their difficulties in driving and playing on the front foot, had something to do with learning to cope with bad wickets and irregular bounce. Cricket, observes the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, was born in the England of leisurely weekends and rural environment, rather than of the industrial city. It was a game ...”

“... press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But this was as nothing to the squalor and piety which marked the Year of Grace 1955. In August, Margaret turned 25 and tried to pick up the threads with ...”

“... and China in particular, sells books in the West and always has done. Marco Polo knew this, as did John Mandeville, that great early impresario of the exotic. It has appealed at a general level as a substantial, unknown space into which, with the right promptings, the individual imagination could rush, expand, unfurl and luxuriate. More specifically, it has ...”

“... Bolex camera and have their portraits made on film. The portraits, each of which used a single 100-foot roll of film, required just under three minutes to make and, as Warhol usually projected them at a slower speed, took slightly longer to watch. At first, these static motion pictures were known around the Factory as ‘stillies’. Eventually, they would be ...”

“... villain’ in Clarke’s phrase), is just one of many men of the cloth whose morals disappoint. John Wesley, silent and dour at a respectable gathering, is rakishly charming when he visits her alone. Take for a final example the renowned physician, collector and charitable benefactor Richard Mead. When Pilkington first approached him for assistance – she ...”

“... flourishes harking back to past dramas of domestic discord, but Paulet’s great-great-grandson, John Paulet, the fifth marquess, had to use the fortifications for real. At the start of the civil war in 1642, Basing House’s aesthetic virtues were second to its strategic significance, namely its command of the main road heading west from London. To puritan ...”

“... to perform a surgical operation with a mechanically-controlled scalpel which could only be moved a foot at a time. Gruber has suggested that Darwin’s equating of gradual with natural and of sudden with supernatural was a permanent feature of his thinking, which predated his evolutionary views and his loss of religious faith. It may have originated with ...”

“... as the Hundred Days Offensive: 122,000 were injured; 26,000 were killed. The monument is a 180-foot-high Doric pillar made of granite; the figure of Liberty stands at the top, with its right arm raised. Before the tower are four flights of steps made of white stone which lead up to the column’s entrance. Walls to the left and right name the smaller ...”