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“... an inefficient, authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that ...”

“... stature. Far more than any of his contemporaries he cut through the conventional wisdom of his day, and though implacably devoted to the task in hand, he always took the long view. He shocked Dulles, at the height of the Cold War, by informing him that Communism was a passing phenomenon, that the notion of a single ‘Western’ interest was absurd and ...”

“... its readiness to dictate terms to his government. In that event, Cromer replied, before election day there would be no sterling reserves left. In which case, said Wilson, they would let sterling float. In which case, shouted Cromer, there would be an international financial crisis (there wouldn’t, of course: Britain floated the pound without difficulty in ...”

“... themes. ‘An Unearthly Child’ was broadcast on a date to conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic concept had come from Sydney Newman, the recently appointed head of drama at the BBC. He was looking for something that would hold children, teenagers and adults in the then-as-now transitional Saturday teatime slot, between ...”

“... on the window-sill.’ Certainly, as Miller illustrates with copious reference to the historian Douglas Shand-Tucci’s studies of homosexual Boston at the turn of the century, Eliot’s Harvard provided ample opportunities for him to cast off his Midwestern earnestness and metamorphose into ‘a very gay companion’, ‘an aesthete’ and ‘a ...”

“... major and recurrent threat. Faced with a Parliament that was (in the phrase of the legal historian Douglas Hay) stupendously over-representative of the wealthiest, the disenfranchised turned to political reform. It is relevant, therefore, that the period covered by these books opens in the aftermath of Peterloo: political discontent was now being met not with ...”

“... into the Robin Hood films, and Knight helps us to see each in the context of its time. In the Douglas Fairbanks silent Robin Hood (1922), Robin’s decision to return from the Crusades reflected contemporary American isolationism: stay out of wars in Europe. The Errol Flynn film The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) imagined a New Deal camp in Sherwood ...”

“... in Swahili, ‘a journey’. Hence one rings up a black African publisher’s salesman in present-day Nairobi and is told he is ‘on safari’ by his black secretary. This does not mean that he is stalking beasts on the Masai steppe, but that he is touring shops and schools. Cameron suggests that the word ‘came into popular use through officialdom ...”

“... and a denim work shirt open to the third button. He was muscular, genial, unabashed. That first day, I recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of ...”

“... The number is right.’ I heard him explain the discrepancy: ‘Now, are some getting killed every day? Sure. Are some retiring at various times or injured? Yes, they’re gone.’ I remembered that a year before he had said the number was 210,000. I heard the Pentagon announce it would no longer release Iraqi troop figures. I heard that 50,000 US soldiers in ...”

“... not many decades later, on the other side of the world – and in the same vocabulary. To this day, the Muslim populations of the southwestern Philippines, most of whom the Spaniards never subdued, are known, even to themselves, as ‘Moros’ (‘Moors’), and their armed resistance to Manila as the Moro National Liberation Front. Yet anti-Muslim (and ...”

“... the Leader of the House) had forgotten that three by-elections were due to take place on the day of the Ely statement. Wilson ‘wondered how it was possible that one should ruin the chances of people voting Labour by having this terrible story blurted out on the six o’clock news’. Crossman began his speech to Parliament with a ‘great frog’ in ...”

“... invented the ‘tradition’ of the ‘Last Night of the Proms’; and from 1968 until the present day, when a succession of BBC controllers of music have tried – with varying degrees of determination and success – to rein in, modify and reinvigorate what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman ...”

“... to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky). 1 August. A propos Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat ...”

“... the pilot in the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon in 1783. Nature needed no exaggeration either. As Douglas Adams once said, ‘isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’ That was in 1979 – but it was possible to think the same thing in 1579.There were many areas of ...”