“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... experience added up to little more than a trundle through the revolving doors of the front hall before moving on to the next stop. Add to that his notorious lack of formal education and you have just about the most improbable political meteor imaginable. So how did he manage it? I suspect that the author of the first of these books would admit that his ...”

“... is the entry for one relatively minor character, Albert Creech: The Jenkinses’ cook (formerly hall-boy to Jenkins’s grandmother) at Stonehurst in 1914: ‘Albert, fleshy, sallow, blue-chinned, breathing hard, sweating a little, fitted an iron bar into sockets ... Rolled shirt-sleeves, green baize apron, conferred a misleadingly businesslike ...”

“... of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and Tammany-...”

“... Upon Don Quixote and Rhenanus’s adaptation of Tom-kis’s Lingua) and illustrations (the elder Peter Breughel’s Mascarade D’Ourson et de Valentin as well as the younger’s Village Fair), so that the old points emerge with new emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and ...”

“... into the open. The opponent is Jan Kott, who wrote Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967), and the Peter Brook production (1970) which dramatised his findings. I take my stand beside the other old buffers here. Kott is ridiculously indifferent to the letter of the play and labours to befoul its spirit. And yet the Victorian attitude to it also feels ...”