“... from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in their minds at the time. Few episodes in the history ...”

“... park on the northern outskirts of the city. For some reason he insisted that he and I and Alec Campbell, the former Conservative leader of the council (he lost his seat in May), speak in a small caravan in the middle of the field round the back.The fact that both men voted to stay in the EU cuts no ice on the doorstep. ‘When Remainers see a blue rosette ...”

“... of a number of the pieces of New Science which Regis describes. Take, for example, the work of Stephen Wolfram. An Etonian who published his first paper on particle physics at the age of 15 and got his PhD from Caltech at 20, Wolfram wanted (in Regis’s words) to explain, ‘not the complexity of any given phenomenon, but complexity itself, wherever it ...”

“... been the beneficiary of largesse from the London treasure-chest of the Southern Confederacy. As Stephen Koss, however, made clear in the first volume of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (1981) – to which the earlier part of this book is heavily indebted – the Standard was by no means alone in allowing itself to be compromised in this ...”

“... busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. Not good lines, but ...”

“... to lean one way are recognised by lawyers and doctors alike. An Early Victorian law lord, Lord Campbell, included even ‘respectable witnesses’ in the temptation to slant their evidence as experts. True, the case recalled by a Master of the Rolls a few years later, in which one side had obtained 68 experts’ reports before finding a favourable ...”

“... of which Mr Podsnap was so incoherently proud, at its ineffable best. The indignation of Lord Campbell of Alloway’s recent protest at Lord Lester’s keeping the House awake by banging on about human rights after dinner rings down its corridors. Having sat in full-bottomed wig and knee breeches at the State Opening and watched a life peer identify his ...”

“... Press, 242 pp., £18 and £5.95, 18 June, 0 335 10580 7), Remembering Orwell, compiled by Stephen Wadhams, introduced by George Woodcock (Penguin, 227 pp., £2.95, 27 September, 0 14 007458 9), Nineteen Eighty-Four and All’s Well? by Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead (Macmillan, 104 pp., £15 and £5.95, 4 April, 033 33493 0), Nineteen ...”

“... Triflers was written in the 1920s as a possible ‘come-back’ for the aging star, Mrs Patrick Campbell. It now had only three acts, butler and footmen had been replaced by the telephone, and the ducal conservatory had become a streamlined modern interior belonging to a young man called the Honourable ‘Daisy’ Vane. ‘Decorations by Bakst,’ the stage ...”

“... quite a lot of it for himself, above all during a single week at the beginning of September 1997. Stephen Frears’s new film The Queen beautifully re-creates this moment, when it became abundantly clear, following the death of Princess Diana, that the British public weren’t interested in truthful displays of reticence anymore; what they wanted was ...”

“... peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems ...”

“... a reward I’m going to let you hear my impersonation of Lord Beaverbrook. My ex-wife Jeannie Campbell was his daughter and he hated me. We just didn’t see eye to eye.’ He then impersonated the great English press baron at length. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think that’s quite good.’ ‘Yeah, he hated me. But we were crazy. When I ...”

“... lord chancellor’s decision left the vice-chancellor’s decision standing. But, although Lord Campbell went out of his way to say that ‘no one can suppose that Lord Cottenham could be in the remotest degree influenced by the interest that he had in this concern,’ the Lords held that he should not have sat. It now seems that Lord Cottenham’s stake in ...”

“... of superiority to fashion, publicity, even print itself. Sterne affected no such loftiness. Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ‘engaged ...”

“... Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped destroy Ian Nairn, the ...”