“... poor communities’. During the First World War the summer traffic more or less vanished and the price of fuel – steam coal was badly needed by the Royal Navy – rose steeply: facing large losses, the company begged for more money ‘otherwise the Mail services will automatically cease’. Soon there was talk of a government takeover, which was eventually ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New ...”

“... die. Investors face the spectre of toxic death bonds that reach maturity far later than their price suggests. ‘Death pools’ like the Ghoul Pool and stiffs.com run sweepstakes on which celebrities will peg out in the current year. Would-be punters on stiffs.com are egged on with a ‘newest stiffs’ page (current features: Ray Bradbury, ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... and if as a result guilty people sometimes walk free, it is not necessarily an excessive price to pay for trying to ensure that people are not convicted unless a fair trial has made a jury sure of their guilt. The great unresolved truth in any criminal trial, whatever the procedure, is not whether the state has satisfied the jury of the accused’s ...”

“... could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting ...”

“... A16. It was a big project for a middling town, with a lot of money riding on it. If the average price of the houses reached £200,000, they alone would be worth £100 million. But consent wasn’t a given. The Environment Agency was bound to be uneasy about the below-high-tide location, regardless of the sea wall. Even though the council was only able to ...”

“... which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’). But what of the ‘perpetual confinement’ as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage ...”

“... and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of –––, as the play called Frankenstein’s creature. Mary Shelley, who went ...”

“... or encourage smuggling. In the middle of the 18th century, taxes effectively doubled the retail price of tea. Government ‘gaugers’ were sent out across the country to assay stocks held by merchants, to audit their books, and to seize tea smuggled from France, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands into unguarded ports, especially in Scotland and the ...”

“... you know, their standards are nothing. But they – in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on our business.’The Morally Concerned Trump: ‘The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid ...”

“... shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully understood the price of the journey, the dissociation, the consequences of leaving home when the scars were still raw, the family illness undiagnosed, to try to become a person. He attempted to hold on to his Yorkshire instincts, but they curdled at the Slade. (Rugby became ...”

“... they thought to displace. Interest in the English 1890s has naturally been growing of late. Richard Ellmann’s biography looked forward, emphasising the importance of Wilde as the martyred prophet of a new dispensation. Others have preferred to look back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John ...”

“... Though he served the lyric stage conscientiously, Hofmannsthal also found in his partnership with Richard Strauss release from an artistic impasse of the kind described in his Letter to Lord Chandos: instead of being constrained to devise drama that was like ‘a tone-poem lacking music’, he now had music itself at his disposal. Auden may have ordered ...”