“... latrine below the monks’ dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who looks not long out of school himself, polishes off the whole sequence in a couple of hours. 10 May. Filling a pot with water to take a huge bunch of peonies L. has sent for my birthday I ...”

“... It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the GLC. One day, he had found himself taking the Underground in the company of a Tory MP. The arriving train was heavily congested and the unaccustomed Tory – who may or may not have been Alan Clark – recoiled from the throng revealed by the opening doors, suggesting ...”

“... and marshmallow. By some estimates, 150,000 Choco Pies were being dispensed in Kaesong every day. Stripped of its cuteness, the story contains two lessons. The first is a reminder of what should be obvious: ordinary North Koreans are in most ways just like everyone else. For all their affected concern for human rights, this is overlooked with depressing ...”

“... in every way from the whoop-it-up trad jazz Abels. Trad – hugely and improbably popular in its day – had a predominantly middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to ...”

“... detail and no quarrelling with the evidence. If the report says subject X showed up in place Y on day Z, in it goes, even if you know subject X had been buried in a distant city a month before. That report, as given, means something and you can never know what, for sure, until the end of time, if then. The central thing to understand is the primacy of ...”

“... fret with a sense of missed opportunity throughout a long retirement. On the evening of Christmas Day, after Ferguson had fallen asleep in front of the TV, they held a meeting and decided to take him on. ‘In the kitchen,’ he writes, ‘a mutiny was brewing.’ The conspirators emerged into the open to confront him. ‘The chief rebel came in and kicked my ...”

“... Council are on the staff of the IISS. Until he stepped down in July, Chatham House was led by Robin Niblett, who spent time at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. RUSI’s director-general, Karin von Hippel, was once chief of staff to the four-star American general John Allen. In 2021, RUSI’s second largest donor was the US ...”

“... of Peacock Pie is taken from ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’, which reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –      That’s ...”

“... of Congresses, built at a truly frantic rate by the Chinese, who ran 24-hour shifts, working all day in the pitiless heat and then all night by floodlight. The Guineans gawped at such efforts (which they would never have dreamt of making themselves), but took the fact of competition in their stride. There was even a period when Mongolia entered the ...”

“... the movement to ‘reform’ them turned the endowment to providing relatively cheap fee-paying day schools for the middle class, with pressure groups making sure that fees were not so low as to encourage a large artisan entry. Parts of the original endowments were used to provide bursaries for those who wished to go to university. A few boys from the ...”

“... of the divide, or oscillating between them, often referring to herself as two separate people, by day a woman in society, by night a man writing into the early hours. In any event, Sand did not drop her pseudonym when, before long, her cover was blown, but instead revelled in her double identity. In 1833 she had a brief affair with the actress Marie Dorval ...”

“... hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ...”

“... optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting … political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering a ...”

“... as ‘this city of Calvinism, high teas and loveless alliances’. It was on ‘the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday’ (i.e. 1 February 1918). The Cambergs were Jewish. After a schooling very much in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie vein, Muriel made the disastrous decision (she was only nineteen) to marry ...”

“... Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something ...”