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“... in his life, an older man was seduced by his combination of energy and deference. T.H. (‘Tim’) Cobb, the headmaster of a respectable public school, Dover College in Kent, decided to appoint him the school’s sports master and extra geography teacher. There were several other more impressively qualified candidates, and Archer’s previous employer had ...”

“... Atlanta after the 1915 première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of molesting and murdering a white female employee.) Atlanta was the headquarters of the powerful Twenties’ Klan, which ...”

“... separate the carcasses. Both types of work exact a physical and psychic toll, what Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett call ‘the hidden injuries of class’. On the kill floors, most workers are ‘at-will’ employees and can be fired at any time. In 2019, the annual turnover in many Texan slaughterhouses was 100 per ...”

“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... context the names of two retired soldiers, Colonel Norman Murphy in Cumbria and Colonel Michael Cobb in Devon, spring to the lips. Marlborough is now on the metaphysical overlay map of Wodehouse’s Merry England. Back to your ...”

“... of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the Pattens in London the very next evening for the first time since long before ...”

“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a parodic exhibition of French images of Anglicity, as so many ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”

“... the case. If one goes by the records, slowly unearthed in the Twenties and Thirties by Edward Cobb, Edward Hicks and A.C. Baugh, the Malory of Newbold Revel was not ‘little better than a criminal’, he was a criminal, and probably by some way the most distinguished criminal ever to have won a place in English letters. Despite a reasonably secure and ...”

“... is just not an ordinary man,’ Cleo later explained. Frustrated Hollywood screenwriters – as Richard Corliss points out in his excellent study, Talking Pictures (1975) – expressed much of their creativity in ephemeral forms: angry memos, practical jokes, one-liners, gossip and bitching at the writers’ tables. Additional Dialogue (Trumbo’s letters ...”

“... his balls from the waiting cameras. By chance I am reading French and Germans, Germans and French, Richard Cobb’s book on France under occupation in the First and Second World Wars and, on the same day as Tebbit’s letter, come across this: ‘Perhaps homosexuals will always welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes or misfortunes as an ...”