“... to Reith: ‘One cannot,’ he said, ‘be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade.’ Harold Macmillan is widely credited with being a TV ‘natural’. Mr Cockerell’s account makes him out to be anything but that. Huw Weldon observed after his first broadcast as prime minister that the script ‘could not be spoken by one human being to another ...”

“... by the princess herself, though since she was wearing a flowery apron they assumed she was the cook. She told them to leave, and they did.Three years later, Hitler arrived in Rome to meet Mussolini. He wanted to visit the Doria Pamphilj picture gallery, home to Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. The authoritative gaze Velázquez gives the pope is ...”

“... and would have refused to accept it ‘from hands still stained with blood’ – a reference to Harold Macmillan, then prime minister. However, it was the end of his lifelong friendship with Namier. ‘I put down the telephone and never spoke to him again... Namier was dead so far as I was concerned.’ All he says about the victorious candidate at this ...”

“... Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken place six months before, and the advent of the SNP had kicked Scottish politics into life. It was a talking rather than a dancing party, and the politics themselves seemed intoxicating enough. Around two we processed ...”

“... since it provides the only tenuous link among these people. The most officious of the strangers, Harold Chapman (a Docklands property-dealer in his other life) is approached for money with vague menaces by a local peasant family who own a crumbling wall that’s threatening to block the way, and he in turn approaches his various neighbours. So it’s a plot ...”

“... of acting with the person in question. ‘A sweetie? Are we talking about the same person?’ ‘Harold Pinter? Can you be serious?’ ‘She’s a bit …’ with a tipping of the elbow to indicate drink taken. I’ve often thought of putting such a session in a play, but unless the names of real actors are used it wouldn’t work.24 January. Watch a DVD of ...”

“... election to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee – the first non-MP to do so since Harold Laski – and carved out a space for himself there, allied with but not wholly subsumed by the Bennites. When Neil Kinnock took on Militant, Blunkett dragged his feet, publicly offered Derek Hatton an olive branch, and was considered ‘fundamentally ...”

“... as an ILP MP had supported disaffiliation and didn’t rejoin Labour until 1944, eventually became Harold Wilson’s minister for the arts, and tripled state funding for Scottish artists while defending the independence of the Scottish Arts Council, preparing the ground for the ‘second Scottish renaissance’ of the 1980s. Willie Ross’s relentless lobbying ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ...”

“... and his friend to the cinema when she was called into the Commons to deputise for her boss, Robin Cook, who was stuck in Edinburgh. She says it would have been easy enough to change her plans, but ‘my maternal self-esteem, precarious at the best of times, would have collapsed altogether if I turned into one of those parents who let their children down ...”

“... schools for women. Dashi made from seaweed or dried fish was for grandmothers: the modern home cook believed in efficiency and innovation.It was time for the bottled miracle to take on the world. After expansion into Japan’s colonial possessions – noodle shops and street vendors in Taiwan, food dealerships in Korea – it infiltrated China by ...”

“... Cochrane, by white youths, by concluding that immigration should be drastically reduced. In 1962, Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, sometimes revered by liberals for decolonisation in Africa as well as its supposed domestic moderation, passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Its system of categories and vouchers was officially based on ...”

“... through Russia.The first case of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of ...”

“... bacchantes, and squeaked about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting stunned the whole colony.’ After Damit and Horse, there was Tottie Harwood and literary London. Edith Jesse didn’t want her daughter back at home after college, so she started to write to keep ...”

“... Carola Dibbell’s astonishing dystopian novel, published in 2015, The Only Ones.) The squire’s cook is disgusted and made resentful by the imminent birth (‘I can tend a death but I’ve no nerve for birth’) and hands in her notice, something her temporary replacement puts down, in a conversation below stairs, to the nearness of her ...”