“... 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 ...”

“... Of course, there always were, but by the 1960s the prying eyes and doomed longings in a Douglas Sirk melodrama had given way to Twist parties and other pagan revels. The throbbing heart and loins of the Updike letters is the telenovela of passion, angst, guilt and other spicy fixings that was his break-up with his first wife, Mary Pennington, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had fallen out when Neil jumped ship from Marshall’s right-wing TV channel, GB News). The next day, Marshall visited the Spectator offices – just a few doors down from the offices of UnHerd, an online publication he also owns – and held a meeting with the magazine’s staff, at which he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lack of evidence, so they have to improvise. ‘Silence can be a great surprise,’ they write. ‘Day after day of silence. No ordinary city sounds in Steep, but also no thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft guns. No clattering crash of a nearby explosion. No wailing chorus of sirens, no choking clouds of dust, no corpses ...”

“... the unlikeliest end any empire ever had – went off without a visible hitch. Almost every day of his five-year term, Patten did battle, as he saw it, on Hong Kong’s behalf. Towards the end he was all but alone, shunned by those he had, as he saw it, tried to protect, on the issue he thought most important: democracy. When he arrived, Hong Kong had a ...”

“... the Invisible Man and the woman serving took no notice, just saying: ‘Well, it’s a bit better day.’ I ask him how he got rid of it and he says it went soon after he met Terry, his wife, so that he attributed it to the stresses of being young (and, I imagine, with eczema, unloved) and living in a bedsit with all the hardships of his young life. While he ...”

“... that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the ...”

“... car, Cash was a hybrid, made up of many parts: he appeared in films (A Gunfight, 1970, with Kirk Douglas); he played in prisons (first performing inside in 1957); he campaigned on behalf of Native Americans, and against the Ku Klux Klan; he opposed the Vietnam War; and in 1973 he released an album, Gospel Road, the soundtrack to a self-financed film based on ...”