“... with us, above all the hymns of the Victorian and what one might call the long Edwardian age. Ian Bradley’s study is fascinating, once past a misguided Introduction, which develops a long comparison between Victorian hymns and modern soap-operas that seems to embarrass Bradley himself halfway through. He is a mine of information not only on the ...”

“... coaxing and cajoling ‘a peaceful solution’ out of a kaleidoscope of groups stretching from Ian Paisley’s branch of the Unionists through to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and whoever they officially or unofficially represent. Typically, this ‘peaceful solution’ seems to involve shuffling Northern Ireland into a closer relationship with the ...”

“... with false recollections of listening to it nine years before included the broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy (‘When we heard it, we knew in an instant that everything would be all right’) and a chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey. The day after Churchill didn’t make his speech on the radio, J.B. Priestley did make one. On 5 June, the Home Service ...”

“... the stories of literary camaraderie or infighting. Ballard must have his reasons for dismissing Ian Hamilton, without deigning to name him, as a ‘self-important Soho idler’ who didn’t deserve Arts Council funding for the New Review, but the book would be more attractive without such spasms of sourness.) Ballard describes himself as an ...”

“... they find little evidence that such a state of affairs ever existed. Others, like Sir Ian Gilmour, define consensus as the pursuit by governments of both parties of policies which avoid ideological extremes and produce a high level of continuity between one administration and another. This is what most people who talk of the ‘post-war ...”

“... of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the dependably unpleasant monster-patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie ...”

“... Was the Week That Was broadcast a sickeningly sycophantic tribute to the assassinated President Kennedy. There was no part of public life, he insisted, which was free of humbug and therefore immune to mockery. Peter’s own statements to journalists must always be treated with caution. He could rarely resist satirising himself or his interviewer, and ...”

“... progress, enjoying the ironies of a political and social life that were often out of sync. Take Ian Paisley: ‘widely perceived in the South as a hilarious survival from another age’, he presaged the Northern future. Yet a distinction between darkness and light underpins Foster’s story. His opposition is between a pluralist, outward-looking, secular ...”

“... were supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian Fleming – ‘his appearance is good, and his manners are agreeable’ – covered the show trials in Moscow of the Vickers engineers. ‘Moscow, Wednesday. As the famous clock on the Kremlin Tower strikes 12 the six Metropolitan-Vickers English employees ...”

“... and the formidable Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Godfrey, and his assistant Ian Fleming. Their meetings must have been fun. Godfrey, brilliant but acerbic, called the RAF the Royal Advertisement Service, and dismissed the Army as the ‘evacuees’, the people the Navy had had to fish out of the sea at Dunkirk, Crete and ...”

“... to Anglo-American relations and would in fact end the special relationship’ – so appalled had Kennedy been by what Harriman told him. For Macmillan that was decisive. Hogg warned Home, also of Eton and Christ Church, to keep out of it: ‘Of course I pitched it strong,’ Hogg said to Ian Gilmour. ‘Alec and I have ...”

“... his manicures, orthodontics, his walnut-stain flesh, still failed to achieve the status of a Kennedy off-cut: cynics persisted in seeing him as a man who’d had so many blow jobs he looked like an inflatable. Marks could afford to grin out of the cover panel of Mr Nice. His teeth were white as glacial chippings, but they were paste. The price he paid ...”

“... takes its title from this Congressional medal. Once you start to look for him, he’s everywhere. Ian MacGregor, the man who helped Thatcher crush the miners, is ‘John Wayne with a Scottish brogue and a pinstripe suit’. ‘Now we don’t want to see no John Wayne performances out here,’ a sergeant tells his platoon in Vietnam. We see them ...”

“... up? Every frame of the video sequence was pored over, as if it were the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination.Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to ...”

“... some examples of well-known criminals who came into a stack of money, like Michael Skakel (the Kennedy cousin who was convicted of murdering Martha Moxley), and run with the slogan: ‘Bush favours tax breaks for rich murderers.’ They say, bafflingly, that ‘the anti-repealers need not have mimicked Lee Atwater’ (the mastermind behind the notorious ...”