“... for a job in Oxford’s geography department wasn’t idle: in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked ...”

“... its own specification for a ‘machine-gun destroyer’ to the Landships Committee. That same day, a demonstration of a tracked Killen-Strait tractor crossing various obstacles was held at Wembley Park for the benefit of Churchill and Lloyd George. It led to a decision to shift responsibility for the Landships Committee from the Admiralty to Lloyd ...”

“... the Middle East’, as Churchill had put it in 1940, receded from view until the dramas of the Six Day War in 1967, the next war in 1973, and the oil crisis. This had a direct impact on British politics, leading to Harold Wilson’s return to Downing Street in 1974. He resigned two years later in a miasma of dark suspicion, not much brightened by his ...”

“... even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are ...”

“... and made appear /Her neck refulgent’. He greatly preferred the 16th-century Scots of Gavin Douglas: ‘Her nek schane like unto the rois in May.’ The rose in Virgil’s ‘rosea’ is completely suppressed in the marmoreal pallor of Dryden’s language, but the real offence is that ‘refulgent’. ‘Refulgent’ in English is ponderously ...”

“... of the romance of the isolated outsider. Praising his performance in Sands of Iwo Jima, General Douglas Mac Arthur (whose words had opened and closed John Wayne’s Bataan/Corregidor film, They Were Expendable), told him in front of the American Legion: ‘You represent the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself.’ So saturated ...”

“... elsewhere alludes to Breuning’s testimony that Beethoven incessantly (and at all hours of the day and night) jotted down ideas for fear of forgetting them. The young Breuning is intrigued by the appearance of a Beethoven sketch-book, which he finds on a piece of furniture in Beethoven’s apartment (‘it was completely full of notes, written in fits and ...”

“... tabloids reported in March that the chairman and vice-chairman of Newcastle, Freddie Shepherd and Douglas Hall, had ridiculed fans who paid the extortionate prices for replica shirts (and said that Geordie women were ‘dogs’), six million was wiped off the club’s share value. Peter Johnson spent his first quarter of a century as a fan at ...”

“... drinking with artists who were busy inventing their reputations. One night, I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell ...”

“... to establish the king as a player in wartime decision-making, most notably when he was championing Douglas Haig, Jones sees his contribution as having less to do with what he did than with his status, which made him the object of generous patriotic feeling. During the mass mobilisation of 1914-16, men joined up to fight for ‘king and country’, with ...”

“... addresses were in Kentish Town, off Oxford Street and in Bloomsbury, all plaque-less to this day no doubt, though Red Ken, before he faded to a more electable off pink, might have thought of honouring this most ragingly anti-authoritarian of London’s asylum seekers.) In 1872 Vallès was sentenced to death in absentia by the courts of the new and as yet ...”

“... Wilson’s delay in devaluing the pound. His sense of social detail is acute, as he reports Alec Douglas-Home’s doomed attempts to be trendy (he announced in a 1964 election speech that his party ‘is delivering the goods and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first ...”

“... Agata. Silent and restless as a mongoose she used to move about from room to room the whole day, a dust towel in her hand, in search of something to scrub. She drives away the other servants, destroys the furniture, hates the dog and walks in her sleep. In a permanent rage, she is close to cheerful only when one of Munthe’s patients is about to die ...”

“... 1970s, Neo-Expressionist painting looked even more absurd than it did before. As critics such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer have stressed, this queering of art was also a matter of content. If the persona behind Abstract Expressionism was the ‘action painter’ in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the ...”

“... British protectorate in 1884 and the territory was rapidly expanded to roughly the size of modern-day Uganda. In 1895 a 300-strong contingent of Punjabi troops was brought in to put down an uprising by the Nubi in the north-west, which had led to the killing of several British officers. It was already possible to identify three groups of Indians in Uganda by ...”