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“... of the Edwardian ‘knut’ (a more philistine version of the dandy and a stock figure of music-hall fun), he explains the two forces behind the knut’s demise: younger sons of the aristocracy being forced to work and the passing of the spat. The First World War would be a better answer but it’s exactly the sort of explanation that’s out of place in ...”

“... for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no corporate case would be brought against Rupert Murdoch’s News UK for hacking or perverting the course of justice. It was Christmas come early on Fleet Street, but that isn’t the way the papers chose to tell it. ‘For the past few years,’ the Daily Telegraph complained, ‘the left has tried to ...”

“... our eye. Take the moment when, as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1921, he records his impression of Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester:   I once passed through Grantchester by bike. Fences, complicated iron gates and barbed wire in the surrounding fields tortured the eyes. A humble humdrumness emanated from the dirty little brick homes. A tomfool wind blew up a ...”

“... was my misfortune never to meet any of the right ones, except Pino and himself.’ Like Rupert Brooke (with his ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’) Lawrence had placed a curious stress on the ‘cleanness’ of the war and the warriors he evoked in The Seven Pillars, but Aldington was not having any of this. There was nothing clean about ...”

“... claims’; ‘Corbyn’s Iraq War apology will do him good – if not Labour’; and ‘Rupert Murdoch predicts Corbyn win.’ Above all this, throwing it into the shade and into context, were the contributions of the Guardian’s big beasts, Polly Toynbee and Jonathan Freedland. Toynbee began by comprehensively misreading the moment, refusing to ...”

“... I am old enough to remember the Maigret series on television, with Rupert Davies in the starring role. To the accompaniment of a mildly haunting theme tune, a portly figure would appear onscreen, drably but comfortably dressed in raincoat and hat, strolling through the damp, mist-laden streets of Paris, pausing on a bridge to light his pipe and look over his shoulder, the whole scene held in grainy black and white ...”

“... hollyhocks on gold Japanese leather-paper to be put in the arch above the fire-place in the hall’ sums up Gwen’s mother’s aspirations for the autumn of 1885. And even Rose Macaulay’s admiration for Period Piece was punctured by the thought that Gwen herself had not really had enough to do, and that she would have been much happier if she had ...”

“... upper-middle-class fun and games, in a new world where to be young was very heaven, suffuses Rupert Brooke’s life and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of sticky passages in E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View and The Longest Journey. Forster, too, was a great admirer of The Way of All Flesh, about which there was ...”

“... room in time, so that he would begin his lecture while strolling up the High Street and enter the hall already well into his third paragraph. The Dean of Divinity who was alleged to have committed the only Magdalen murder, and how it had been decided not to call the police in for fear of scandal. How Harry Weldon, leader of the more progressive ...”

“... his life. On 3 February, as a prelude to the Brexit trade talks, he gave a speech in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... of Saddam Hussein remain unknown, but Tony Benn is alive and well and coming soon to a concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own website (www.tonybenn.com). As Tony Blair’s Government spins itself ...”

“... with the speeches Churchill made in 1947-48. In a speech to a United Europe Meeting at the Albert Hall on 14 May 1947 (not mentioned by Young), Churchill asked: Are we Europeans to become incapable, with all our tropical and colonial dependencies, with all our long-created trading connections, with all that modern production and transportation can do, of ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... decadents of the Nineties, they are briskly elbowed aside by a fiercer sisterhood who prey upon Rupert the Bear, Felix the Cat and a whole wretched menagerie of juvenile fetishes. And this inevitably will be the final stand for the Class War papers. It takes 20 years for stapled samizdat effusions that everybody has and nobody wants to become prized ...”