“... death. Dyson’s book enters the fray over who gets to speak for the icon of Martin Luther King. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed not only the civil rights movement but also the national legislation ending legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national holiday. There ...”

“... water when London was burning. Not all accounts are as forgiving. In his excellent 1989 biography, Ronald Hutton presents a monarch who brought monarchy into disrepute and whose ‘good-humoured composure’ was a mask, behind which was ‘a cold void’. Catherine does not really feature, although Hutton is clear that Charles was mean to her.The burgeoning ...”

“... not allegory.5 September, Mells. I knew about Mells from reading Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox and from all the First World War stuff which comes at the end of the first act of Forty Years On. The church closes off a short street of terraced houses which wouldn’t be remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like ...”

“... thinker was complete without an American epiphany, a journey across the Atlantic to where Ronald Reagan’s United States seemed to hum and sparkle in a virtuous free market circle of efficiency and prosperity. Apart from the reality that, for most Americans, it didn’t, the problem was that extreme pro-privatisation Brits like Littlechild thought ...”