“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... Her three husbands had 20 wives. Sinatra seems to have been the serious one. Shooting Mogambo, John Ford gave a party for the British Governor of Uganda and his wife. A man’s man, as they say, Ford thought of a little joke to put Ava on the spot. ‘Why don’t you tell the Governor what you see in that hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married ...”

“... writes about Oakland’s general manager, Billy Beane, and his Yale-educated sidekick, a numbers guy called Paul DePodesta, who attempted to apply Wall Street style derivatives analysis to the problem of how to win baseball games. What’s attractive about sport from this point of view is that it gives you a yes or no answer, a win or a loss. Beane and ...”

“... have risen to the very top of British intelligence but for a run of bad luck when his roommate, Guy Burgess, defected to Russia with a third man under active investigation. Serious investigators understood in a minute that it wasn’t by chance that Philby was caught up in this catastrophe, but Angleton, who had shared many long lunches with Philby in ...”

“... close now than when I began.’ In the summer of 1960, the year after he wrote that, he visited John F. Kennedy at home in Hyannisport. He was there on behalf of Esquire magazine, to interview the young Catholic who sought the Democratic nomination, and Kennedy took him very seriously. In fact, he had mugged up before meeting the novelist. He knew that ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... of the usual morose adolescent parables and things like that. The first issue had a foreword by John Wain, the novelist, who had just appeared then and was very famous. I wrote to him to ask if there was some message he could send to youthful aspirants and he did. It was rather good, about half a page, which ended: ‘and, if all this fails, back to the ...”

“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... and envol drapings – and in the excess of fabric: 18 metres for just one outfit. The designer John Cavanagh sat through the show ‘transfixed … in tears. The relief was overwhelming; the relief of seeing total beauty again.’ The government sent Madge Garland to Paris with £1000 to procure samples for British designers to copy. Garland had been ...”

“... to make it glow at night: a top-dressing of contaminated Edmonton ash. ‘No more dangerous than Guy Fawkes night,’ declared Meacher to the House. Walking north towards Picketts Lock, we turn our backs on the incinerators, the smoke. Frame it out, it’s not there. Go with the Dufy doodle on the side of London Waste’s rectangular box, the company’s ...”

“... In Bevan, the BMA found itself negotiating with a man at once brilliant and a bully. Dr Guy Dain, chairman of the BMA’s council, who had already called Bevan ‘a complete dictator’, now claimed that he was ‘rude, blustering and threatening’. Clegg published a report noting that ‘Hitler at the very inception of the Nazi regime imposed ...”

“... Duvert, Renaud Camus, as well as several who have died in the last decade, such as Hervé Guibert, Guy Hocquenghem and Gilles Barbedette – but I’m sure none of these writers except possibly the militant Fernandez would accept the label ‘gay writer’, although all of them have written primarily about aspects of their own sexual identity. I don’t even ...”

“... at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the latter for his kindly, slightly alcoholic smile (‘He had the look of a person who understood other people, who wanted to hear what they had to say’). Joseph Alsop, making chitchat ...”

“... in 1895, after he was booed off the stage by rowdy elements during a curtain call for his play Guy Domville. The play had represented only a relatively small aspect of his work, while the New York Edition was supposed to represent its essence. As late as 13 June 1910 he could still write, to Edmund Gosse, that ‘black depression – the blackness of ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”