“... Thing comes out: bright green, furry, long-legged … The size of a dinner plate, and very cross. It’s Mummy. I stamp. Squelch. Yuk.’ His nanny used to follow marching guardsmen when she took him out in his pram; later she introduced him to war comics and boys’ adventure stories. ‘What Nanny didn’t tell me was that these books were for ...”

“... In​ How to be Topp (1954), Nigel Molesworth unveils ‘the Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-you Letter’. The sender is instructed to strike out the words which don’t apply, before thanking the present-buyer for theTrain. Tractor. germ gun. kite.delicious present. sweets.Space pistol. Toy socks.The letter ends with a blank space to be filled in with a date to remind the recipient when the next present is due ...”

“... people will be satisfied, for much longer, with … the marking of a ballot paper with a single cross once every five years. People want a much greater say … to make their influence felt on decisions that affect them. Benn argued that Parliament should be televised, and that voters and journalists should have much greater access to government papers ...”

“... formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed by Nigel Finch for Arena Films. It is in fact a collaborative performance piece staged by Bourgeois and the director which successfully enacts the antagonism between interviewer and interviewee characteristic of Bourgeois’s encounters with the investigative ...”

“... that is also a crucial source for a major historical event. Domesday Book (1086) provides a cross-section of a society centuries before such information could be extracted from any other source, in England or anywhere else. Then, and since, it has furnished the ruling classes with their title-deeds. A little over a century ago, the Battle of Hastings ...”

“... of whom have good reason for being there except me, who started it all. I watch the first shot, Nigel Hawthorne as George III on the brink of madness, talking to a pig, marvelling in between takes at some wonderful run-down 18th-century barns with intricate grey beamed roofs and sagging tiles. Nick H. seems happy enough and has at least got round the ...”

“... Heritage Lottery Fund gave grants to 285 projects marking the bicentenary. In the wake of the New Cross Fire of 1981, the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the recognition of institutional racism in the police, attitudes had changed. In 2007, community groups, museums and galleries, the BBC, libraries and schools organised numerous theatre ...”

“... described it to his sister Violet: ‘the moon thinly veiled: a man carrying a plain wooden cross and a lantern leading the way: some other lanterns glimmering: the scent of wild thyme’.The people who read about Brooke in the papers knew nothing of this, and nothing of his charm and beauty (Leonard Woolf: ‘His looks were stunning – it is the only ...”

“... tried to calm the situation; Henry and Ferguson turned up too. Henry told the prosecution under cross-examination that he thought Grant-Murray, who had been stabbed a few weeks before in Henry’s company, was in danger. ‘My natural instinct was to help him,’ he said. The prosecution case was that Henry had a knife in his shoulder bag. But there was no ...”

“... nearly a year, and Channon never fought at all. Instead, he went to Paris with the American Red Cross and spent 1918 living in the Ritz with exiguous official duties, while plunging into the ‘Faubourg’, the last bastion of the Ancien Régime in the Third Republic: ‘Had tea with the old Duchesse de Rohan … Tea with the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre ...”

“... in the language of identity politics, not economic policies. Ukip supplies the perfect example: Nigel Farage et al don’t actually talk all that much about the EU; instead, they talk about migration and English identity. The inevitable outcome of the growth in identity politics is further to diminish the capacity of the EU for collective action. As the ...”

“... the ‘war on terror’ was soaring. At our first meeting, Manning’s Downing Street successor, Nigel Sheinwald, told me angrily that security in Palestine could be achieved by eradicating the ‘virus’ of Hamas from Gaza, and eliminating its ‘disease’ from the region. He had no interest in helping to create legitimate Palestinian security ...”

“... case for having harboured Lucan in her hotel for the night. The boys were alerted and the cross-Channel ferry was boarded. According to participants, there can’t have been many reporters or policemen sober enough to pursue the trail at the other end – there was some surprise among the receiving dignitaries – but since the trail led to Mme ...”

“... service. It was his job to implement the policies of the government of the day, and it ‘did not cross my mind as a middle-ranking civil servant that I could seriously question it’. Not everyone agreed with him. As he briefed journalists on Thatcher’s monetarist policy over dinner in 1981, one of them announced that ‘Tim Lankester is Thatcher’s ...”

“... Meloni, and Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Nationalism’s transnationalism isn’t new but cross-border connections have been supercharged in the digital age. NatCon is a global franchise: as well as official conferences in Florida, Brussels, Washington DC and elsewhere, there have been aligned gatherings in Brazil and Mexico. For many on the ...”