“... the Thatchers. When he suddenly decided, at the end of his astonishing 1985 season, to march from John O’Groats to Land’s End to raise money for leukaemia research, there was, as Frank Keating persuasively proves, not an ounce of self-publicism in it. He knew his stunt could raise money, so he performed it – at great physical cost. Everyone quoted in ...”

“... of unintended promotion takes a subtler form in the case of Amis’s fictional counter-hero, John Self, the money-glutton and pornographer, a man with as much interior culture as a massage parlour. The author describes this crass compendium of gross appetites so brilliantly, and with such inventive wit, that the character comes to seem perversely deep ...”

“... Before Sir John Deodoran, Magus of the Scrolls, Lord Justice Clam and Lord Justice Null. Law Reporter: E.P. Thompson The Court of Appeal enforced circumlocutory injunctions restraining the Fourth Estate from publishing whatever any judge had injuncted, whether it had already been universally published or no. The greater part of the submissions were heard in camera and the Court injuncted publication of the terms of the injunctions ...”

“... and other menaces. These books are as decorative and inventive as the Kay Harker novels of John Masefield, which they ...”

“... Satan’, and that point of view has been supported, if not phrased in quite the same way, by Pope John Paul II. So wary were the Anglo-Saxons of Latin Freemasonry that it was not until 1973 (just about the time that P2 was really getting into its stride) that the British hierarchy chose to pay it full respect. Even so, there remains a very basic difference ...”

“... Anthony Trollope was a self-confessed workaholic. ‘If my success were equal to my energy,’ he remarked at the age of 55, ‘I should be a great man.’ He was also a compulsive writer. Ten years later, aware of advancing age, he told his son: ‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another. Nothing really frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness ...”

“... Whig hero of Parliamentary liberty, Sir Edward Coke, ruled out votes for women; and radicals like John Lilburne, whose tiresomeness as a husband is enjoyably recounted by Fraser, did nothing to restore them, even though contested Parliamentary elections had become more frequent, and even though Parliament came in the 1640s to play a much larger part in ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... with the frankly socialist movement associated with such names as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and John Burns, but Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite escaped from the conventional class ...”

“... of leading a crusade. I have led one.’ The classic mode of acceptance, however, was John F. Kennedy’s in 1960: ‘With a deep sense of duty and high resolve, I accept your nomination. I accept it with a full and grateful heart – without reservation – and with only one obligation – the obligation to devote every effort of body, mind and ...”

“... Priapeville, Bordelopolis, Voluptopolis. There is possibly a touch more wit in the wry name that John Camden Hotten, who laboured in the dubious sector of the London book trade, gave to a series of reprints he published in the 1870s: the ‘Library Illustrative of Social Progress’. Another example of Victorian erotica, The Pearl, A Journal of Facetiae ...”

“... as the kind of unanticipated stroke of fortune that has again and again come to England’s aid. John Bull had his drawbacks as a national symbol, but surely Mr Micawber is no improvement. ‘We inhabit as golden an age as men have ever known,’ Allison writes, and argues that if the English present is better than the past, despite the strident objections ...”

“... with long extracts from newspapers. There is even a trace of pomposity. Explaining his support for John McDonnell as his vice-chairman, he writes: ‘I would prefer him to be my successor.’ Perhaps the first recorded evidence of the Divine Right of Kens. Too much of his book reads like standard, stale political autobiography whose basic theme is that the ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”