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“... which has almost no money, virtually no formal responsibilities and sits in an 18th-century town hall on the high street. Powell was the lesser mayor, and it rankled. It still does. Being mayor number two, he had to stand behind the borough mayor at municipal events. ‘The second-fiddle aspects,’ he said, as he drove me back from Witts’s house. ‘They ...”

“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ...”

“... The Twittering Machine (2019), which argues that the compulsive qualities of social media – its hall-of-mirrors narcissism, the dopamine hit of likes, clicks and follows – are used to manipulate our ‘fantasies, desires and frailties’ for profit. Participating in social media is to risk developing sadistic and self-harming forms of behaviour, since ...”

“... December 1974 Miss S. has been explaining to me why the old Bedford (the van not the music-hall) ceased to go ‘possibly’. She had put in some of her home-made petrol, based on a recipe for petrol substitute she read about several years ago in a newspaper. ‘It was a spoonful of petrol, a gallon of water and a pinch of something you could get in ...”

“... weakness of the government’s response, in 2019 when the Cube, a nearly new seven-storey student hall of residence in Bolton (it opened in 2015) was devoured by a fire that spread with frightening speed from the fourth to the sixth floor via its cladding. The building was swamped with firefighters – almost one for each of the more than two hundred people ...”

“... impossible figure, but he could pretend to be him, act the part as it might be played on a music-hall stage, and in the process become something else, something more interesting and possibly even something new – synthetic not only in the sense of ‘inauthentic’ but in a dialectical sense, too. Ziggy Stardust is an archetype of the popstar that has ...”

“... the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’). She worked backstage at a theatre in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began ...”

“... in a more populist direction by exogenous influences, operating quite independently of the lecture-hall or the classroom. The preservation of the past, which thirty years ago was the province of small bodies of experts, is today a mass activity in which tens of thousands of people play some part. County Record offices, temples for the worship of the archives ...”

“... modern biographers have set out to fill the gap. R.H. Super has delivered his book first; N. John Hall’s and Victoria Glendinning’s Trollopes are still to come. Sportingly, Super subtitles his biography ‘A Life’, leaving open the possibility that this may not turn out to be the life. But at least he has the consolation of being first past the ...”

“... him a man with no credentials in science. Wolcot, the lampoonist, who wrote under the name of Peter Pindar, was probably not alone in finding Banks a study in vanity: an intellectual flea Hopping on Science’s broad, bony back. Although Banks did much to promote the international image of the Royal Society during his 42-year tenure as its President, he ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... The Man’s Shop’; another had his codename written on his washbag. The former diplomat Peter Churchill parachuted into France without checking his wallet, which contained a ten-bob note and the previous day’s Times crossword. The RAF considered SOE unprofessional, unchivalrous and a drain on resources, and without Winston Churchill’s patronage ...”

“... how Jonathan Power tells it. Amnesty began in 1961, with the simple and apparently absurd idea of Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, that governments could be persuaded to release political prisoners simply by ordinary people writing letters to them. This remains the core of Amnesty’s work. Power’s is not an uncritical history. He refers both to the ...”