“... titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure. The hall, though large, wasn’t big enough to seat the hundreds of balding, besuited businessmen who showed up; closed-circuit televisions had to be installed in adjacent classrooms. Heller was the era’s most influential proponent of Keynesianism, then the ...”

“... aesthetics of ‘healthy art’, censorship and the licensing of press, theatre and concert hall – these are some of the measures which ‘the earnest little professor with the red Nietzsche moustache’ was introducing in the first weeks of this febrile commotion. Of all these measures it might be said that they carry one man’s patricidal urge ...”

“... who took an interest in their pupils. In the first years of the century, Joseph Jowett of Trinity Hall (who arranged the setting from Handel which became famous as the chime of Big Ben) was noted ‘for the perennial freshness of his interest in young men’ – though he, like Simeon, was drawn to them by his evangelical faith in their souls as well as by ...”

“... accomplishment, ideas or social background. Her chapter ‘The Eccentric Squire of Walton Hall’, for example, dwells on the popular naturalist Charles Waterton’s bizarre habits and opinions – his obsession about the Hanoverian rat, his habit of greeting visitors on all fours and snapping at their feet, his erratic programmes of local ...”

“... up in the world) and in the houses of his friends, or he met them while shopping in Westminster Hall and the Royal Exchange, and at street markets. But for penetrative sex he seems to have preferred married women whose husbands worked for the navy, whose interests he could advance in return. Pepys worried about pregnancy, and marriage offered a ...”

“... candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal precursor of the post-war scholarship boy, and in his first term joined both the University Socialist Club and the student branch of the Communist Party. Within Cambridge English his main ...”

“... neutralists make substantial moral claims. To defend the two-face schema, Gray could say, echoing Richard Rorty, that there’s the bit where neutralists say it, and then there’s the bit where they take it back. ‘It’ here is the neutralists’ claim that they avoid controversial moral ideals. But then they take this claim back, relying on a moral ideal ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted candidates as ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... here, people will ask us what we were doing.’ His speech struck a chord with some workers in the hall. ‘Of course he’s right,’ shouted a man behind me. A young delegate said his collective did not support the general manager. ‘We don’t know his programme or what he stands for. We’ll need him here as general manager more than as a deputy. Why do ...”

“... those in some of the panelled rooms in the Musée Carnavalet and in the chimneypiece landscape by Richard Wilson in the dining-room at Platt Hall, Manchester, where sunlight and clouds are embraced by stone-grey rococo plasterwork touched with gold. When we admire Chardin’s paintings today in the art gallery they retain ...”

“... political officer in the Middle East. Clayton’s successor, appointed at Weizmann’s urging, was Richard Meinertzhagen, an ardent Zionist and an anti-semitic Christian. ‘I am imbued with anti-semitic feelings,’ he wrote in a diary passage quoted by Segev. A few years later, Weizmann asked Churchill to remove Congreve as well. Churchill complied. Zionist ...”

“... McGreevy wrote, are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted ...”

“... supplant the star and become a legend in his own head. As Reagan told the Hollywood writer Gladys Hall in 1942, he did not ‘believe you have to be a standout from your fellow men in order to make your mark in the world. Average will do it.’ A plain speaker from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood, and later by Sacramento and ...”