“... discovery of the Romantic poets continues to be made. What Coleridge put in a notebook – the white dung of a hawk falling from the sky, the shadows cast on urine by candlelight – could and can go into poetry, along with the wasp trying to get out of the window, a menstrual problem, buying veal, what a husband thought the wife said, what she felt he ...”

“... and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he personally had sought: over the past 17 years he has tried to establish a new racially inclusive model of land distribution). In fact, the story told in My Father ...”

“... hopes were still pinned, was a comfort here. So was Harold Wilson’s idea (later taken up by Tony Blair) that Britain’s past imperial experience gave her unique tools and skills that could still be used to solve world problems; Britain was said to possess cultural sensitivities, for example, that the US conspicuously lacked. Attlee, too, thought the ...”

“... date, CBS aired An Oprah Special: The Presleys – Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley. Dressed all in white, Oprah and Riley sat down on pristine white armchairs in Graceland’s sunny living room, with its stained-glass windows of peacocks and Elvis’s white grand piano in the ...”

“... the first works to bring the history of sport in Britain into the realm of social history proper, Tony Mason’s Association Football and English Society). Other exponents of ‘national efficiency’ recognised the limitations of stamina and pluck when unsupported by trained intelligence and skill. Asking, in the Fortnightly Review in 1901, ‘Will England ...”

“... pirating of Bevan’s phrase ‘In place of fear’ for Barbara Castle’s industrial relations White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ was for many the last straw.) As Bevan’s biographer, Foot kept the faith alive, and eventually his twenty selfless years as High Priest were considered sufficient qualification for the leadership. Whether Bevan, if he could ...”

“... for the rest of my life.’ The following year, apparently in pursuit of this ideal, she married Tony David, an officer in the Indian Army. He emerges as a dim but affable wastrel whose devotion to his wife met with a lukewarm response at the best of times – and they did not last long. She went to India with him after the war, hated it and came back to ...”

“... for these dashing chaps, who, while they had the insouciant air of fighter pilots, sought the white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while ...”

“... flourish within the union. There was no need at all for a Scottish parliament. What would a white elephant like that do for Scotland that couldn’t be done in private? Much better, surely, to have a fierce Scot in the cabinet who, in return for doing the prime minister’s bidding, was indulged in his demands, however outrageous, for cross-border ...”

“... him write them. I looked at filmed interviews, including I forget how many hours of out-takes from Tony Palmer’s film Aspects of Stravinsky. I soon realised that, in order to weigh up what I was hearing, I needed to know something about the speakers’ relationships with the composer and those around him, which was precisely what I was trying to find out by ...”

“... faith and would live another 25 years. Betjeman sits most comfortably alongside the Goons or Tony Hancock, quirky depressives of the wireless age whose voices speak to a disenchanted, disconnected world, laughing it all off until the red light in the studio goes out. Betjeman, his name apart, was utterly, balefully English in everything except his hatred ...”

“... Thatcherism continues to cast its long shadow over British politics. At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady ...”

“... several times in Ben Affleck’s 2012 historical spy thriller, Argo. Based on the memoir by Tony Mendez, a CIA agent, the movie depicts the covert rescue of six US embassy workers caught up in the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis; the CIA used a fake film-shoot – of a schlocky sci-fi story called ‘Argo’ – as cover for spiriting the diplomats out ...”

“... swords against their plastic shields. But the biggest cheer by far came the night after when Tony Hadley arrived to sing Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’. Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m not sure whether the audience knew ...”

“... creatively accounted.) I slightly got to know Gingrich’s press spokesman, a raffish Brit named Tony Blankley who chain-smoked in defiance of all regulations, kept a good table and had given up a promising career as a child-actor when he got too chubby. (‘My last movie was also Humphrey Bogart’s last movie.’) Just before the 1992 Presidential ...”