“... weren’t interested in ‘causes’. But Hecht has found his cause. His introduction came via Peter Bergson, the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, who had come to America from Lithuania by way of Palestine. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, Kook formed a series of organisations to continue his work, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and ...”

“... his frugality and diligence. Though he drank and smoked himself to death, and enjoyed the music hall and Chelsea Football Club, he refused all honours and never sought a penny beyond his salary, so that when he died in 1951, his wife Flo was left in relative poverty. He was unsparingly hardworking to the end. In his last years as foreign ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... second has been something of a mystery until now. In January 1958 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, resigned in protest at the growth of public expenditure. In a successful disinformation campaign it was put about that he had resigned in dispute over some relatively trifling sum. But as the files reveal, Thorneycroft had been raising ...”

“... necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of national isolation that Churchill had ...”

“... of urbanisation. On the whole, though, Morton’s politics are sufficiently well-hidden for Peter Mandler, in The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), to call him ‘no reactionary’ (on the grounds of his move, in 1931, to the Daily Herald), and his England a ‘relatively liberated and democratic version of the Arts and Crafts countryside’, in ...”

“... of continued swift riding produces a paroxysm in the sensorium, amounting to delirium.’ Hall, cot, tree, tower, glade, mead, waste or woodland, are seen, passed, left behind, and vanish as in a dream. Motion is scarcely perceptible – it is impetus! Volition! The horse and her rider are driven forward, as it were, by self-accelerated speed. A ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... of Saddam Hussein remain unknown, but Tony Benn is alive and well and coming soon to a concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own website (www.tonybenn.com). As Tony Blair’s Government spins itself ...”

“... clock crept round to eleven. ‘Shouldn’t have to do it,’ she would snap. ‘Too senior. Let Peter Metcalfe do it. Let Whatsi Willis do it, he can’t be thirty.’ When he came in my mother smelled alcohol on his breath. ‘Surely not risking your licence?’ She looked brittle. ‘It’s the atmosphere there at Minshull Street,’ he said. ‘It’s ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”

“... use – it’ll be ‘pooled’. The Guardian is getting three British embed places. The briefing hall is crammed with journalists, photographers and camera operators. There are no windows. It’s close and humid. The US colonel doing the briefing keeps referring to ‘embedding for life’, meaning that journalists are expected to stick with their assigned ...”

“... I used an empty flat in Islington, where I would go to collect his mail, the emptiness of the hall seeming all the emptier for the pile of mail on the floor, addressed to someone who didn’t exist but was more demanding than many who did.It wasn’t long before I saw Ronnie’s face on a driving licence. It took a few weeks to secure a passport. The ...”

“... what a mournful middle-class qualifier! – that ‘the show was a success: the suburban hall was almost three-quarters full.’ Pandit Rasraj, an eminent singer approaching the end of the ‘relatively brief period’ when a classical musician’s ‘creative powers and his visibility coincide’, is described as entering the ‘second phase, of ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”