“... and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.18 March. Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one of a growing number, I imagine, of those held on Zoom. I am unexpectedly on the verge of tears for someone who always put a smile on my face in art and life. I once told him that I was hoping to write a play, the first ...”

“... chosen by the Tories, in a field they think could be won (railways, British Leyland, the civil service or steel).’ Was it mere coincidence that these were four of the main sites of major industrial disputes during Thatcher’s first administration? For Ridley, the mining industry required the most detailed attention. A future Tory government, it was ...”

“... at the time, was determined to endow scholarships that would attract bright pupils to the colonial service. Suret won one in 1938, his prize a trip to French West Africa. The following year he won a trip to Indochina. He couldn’t fail to notice the difference between the two. In West Africa he’d been told by the French, ‘the Africans are good chaps as ...”

“... it, in the cough of snarling weekend traffic. Through all the miles of hamlets dominated by US service personnel, the tidy estates of Euro functionaries, and the secure parks of exiled kleptocrats, I never questioned whether this journey was necessary. Adolfo was propelled by the memory of an obligation, in his early legal days, to drive out here to a ...”

“... the coast, Flavin was the first to spot the incoming storm. She sent her report to the Irish Met Service in Dublin, who shared it with the Allies in London. The next day, the meteorologist James Martin Stagg’s team of forecasters identified a break in the storm on 6 June, a narrow window of opportunity over the Channel that would allow the landings to ...”

“... to face covert attacks from right-wingers: it was alleged (and still is) that the British Secret Service was conspiring to remove this prime minister. The most blatant ‘Fascist’ move in the Britain of 1968 came when Cecil Harmsworth King, a hereditary owner of newspapers, invited Earl Mountbatten to seize the governance of Britain. Had the Earl been ...”

“... husbands and wives than between patrons and clients. When these homosocial bonds of gift and service come into conflict with the claims of marriage – as they do in the final movement of The Merchant of Venice, where Portia contrives to supplant Antonio as Bassanio’s principal benefactor – Shakespeare isn’t necessarily sympathetic to the ...”

“... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...”

“... One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics. The attempt to claim, for one agenda or another, this ...”

“... yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired. Robert Dallek is troubled by the absence of leadership in contemporary American politics, and his biography of FDR is meant to show us what the real thing looks like. ‘In this time of demoralisation,’ he writes, ‘it seems well to remind Americans that the ...”

“... college letter came the best Christmas of my life. Before university, though, there was National Service to be got through, regarded at best as a bore but for me, as a late developer, a long dreaded ordeal; it was touch and go which I got to first – puberty or the call-up. I served briefly in the infantry, then like many university entrants at that time ...”

“... has gone out of British Airways and that as the stewards have got older and less outrageous so the service has declined. This morning there is scarcely a smile, not to mention a joke, the whole flight smooth, crowded and utterly anonymous. The British Council reading is packed, with two hours of radio and TV interviews beforehand. All the interviewers are ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”