“... reference to the work of W.G. Runciman). Odd, too, that Appleton and Aston are missing from the roll-call of the Cavendish. Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in ...”

“... mention when they apply for a rise in wages.In this way they decide from above, from the roll of dollars,in this way the dwarf traitor receives his instructions,and the generals act as the police force,and the trunk of the tree of the country rots.This warning was published in 1967, just after the CIA had abolished civilian rule in ...”

“... 1 January 2003. A Christmas card from Eric Korn:This is the one about JesusAnd his father who constantly sees usLike CCTV from aboveBut they call it heavenly love;And the other a spook or a birdOr possibly merely a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again ...”

“... a fairly straightforward backlash thesis. Just as Jim Crow was an attempt by Southern whites to roll back the gains former slaves had won during Reconstruction, so the New Jim Crow was designed to reverse the progress black people had been making since the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Now that brazen appeals to racism had fallen out of ...”

“... the opera together, and Wilfred slept, which he was allowed to do until he snored, and Muriel and Eric talked, and talked, and talked. When Eric died, his place was taken, and the flame of impossible love kept burning, by Gerry, who had been British minister in a small country, and was invariably accompanied by a ...”

“... For Cronin it seems vaguely, very vaguely, to have something to do with religion and a text by Eric Griffiths which Cronin, understandably, misattributes to Christopher Ricks in Beckett’s Dying Words. Griffiths’s edifying send-off was impressive even by the standards of the ghastlier forms of obituary-speak: ‘Catholics pray for the dead that they be ...”

“... MacKenzie’. I wish, as they say. 26 January. The papers are full of the beastliness of Eric Cantona who kicked some loud-mouthed, pop-eyed Crystal Palace supporter and got himself suspended for it ... for ever, some soccer lovers hope. Currently Walker’s Crisps are running a TV advert in which Gary Lineker, returning home from Japan, sits on a ...”

“... or, in Orwell’s words, ‘any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.’ Eric Blair’s choice of the name ‘George Orwell’ as a pseudonym is symptomatic of that trajectory: you break free of your family by adopting the name of a tidal river in Suffolk, but tidal rivers ebb away and then flow back home again.I first encountered ...”

“... response to the public sector bloat which supposedly created Britain’s ruinous deficit. Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for communities and local government between 2010 and 2015, declared that ‘local government is a massive part of public expenditure. It has lived for years on unsustainable growth, unsustainable public finance … People ...”

“... the end of the month, then of Macron. One called him ‘le roi Macron’: she wanted his head to roll. They were playful and serious by turns and they had a plausible case. It didn’t cross my mind that two months later, after round upon round of violent demonstrations in France’s major cities, I’d be with a group of protesters – many in their late ...”

“... a particularly good collection of modern British paintings, and from which I was hoping to choose Eric Ravilious’s Train Landscape. It’s a painting redolent of all the journeys by train I remember, particularly in my teens and during my National Service, when it was still possible to explore the English countryside by rail, a period that the foolishness ...”

“... was as if he was saying: ‘Just look at all this stuff we suddenly have to play with in rock and roll! We’re the first, too! Isn’t it a gas?’ It’s very hard with a lot of his songs from the early 1970s to tell how far Bowie’s tongue is lodged in his cheek; maybe he didn’t know himself. A lot of his more ‘surreal’ lyrics of this time are more ...”

“... the mighty test pilots belonged, men like Trubshaw and his military counterparts Roly Beamont and Eric Brown, men who were stuffed with as much unostentatious grandeur as Chuck Yeager in the US. Benn had come along on many of Concorde’s earlier proving flights, including one in 1970 when a hydraulic system failed and the plane went into ‘an uncontrollable ...”

“... little blue sky separates some of the more humourless readings from some of the sillier gags. In Eric Idle’s Rutles mockumentary All You Need Is Cash (1978), it’s the George-like Stig who is supposed to have died (and been replaced by a wax model), his own mysterious extinction signalled by the fact he’s not wearing any trousers on the sleeve of Shabby ...”

“... victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour of so many busy people. Historians naturally predominate, and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson ...”