“... was a racist, or because non-white men steered clear of him, or both. From many contenders, Anthony Scaramucci on The Rest Is Politics: US chose the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as his ‘Father of the Year’, because Lutnick, after loudly proclaiming his disgust at Epstein’s behaviour in 2005 (having ...”

“... is beautiful’ before its time. Another, more pragmatic coterie, presided over by Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City Association, realised some of the most substantial and enduring Utopian designs in the planned communities of Letchworth, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Welwyn Garden City. A third approach, in conscious and deliberate opposition to this ...”

“... Bacon​ was 39 when he tipped up at the club in 1948. He was introduced to it by Brian Howard, the poet and journalist who is Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and ‘two-thirds’ of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (the other third, Evelyn Waugh said, was Harold Acton). ...”

“... of murderers. A few days later, the Law Lords delivered a landmark decision in the case of Anthony Anderson, a double murderer who had brought an application for judicial review of the terms of his sentence against the Home Office. Had Hindley lived, the Lords’ judgment in Anderson’s favour might also have led to her release from prison, where she ...”

“... egg Gilbert Murray and Lady Mary, daughter of the earl and countess of Carlisle, owners of Castle Howard and much else. Arnold J. Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had died young in 1883 after a promising beginning as a social reformer and radical economic historian (he is credited with giving currency to the term ‘the Industrial ...”

“... I decided I would stop concealing that myself.’ On 1 October 1969, aided by his Rand colleague Anthony Russo and using a primitive Xerox machine in the office of Russo’s friend Lynda Sinay, the owner of a small advertising agency, Ellsberg began his monumental task. Working through the night, he and his friends would copy 47 volumes of the Pentagon ...”

“... of 13, a trifle young even for the man-eating Diana. The cast were brilliant – the young Trevor Howard, Rex Harrison, the green-eyed Kay Hammond, who was to be such a success in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit – and this, together with all the jollity and schoolboy humour and comic French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to ...”

“... Mrs Ghaffari asked, had he done wrong? He had impersonated a sex-fiend. As well arrest and convict Anthony Hopkins for cannibalism. Hopkins gets $15 million to star in the sequel to Silence of the Lambs: Ghaffari gets ‘hard time’ and lifelong stigma. There are other cases currently going forward in the Californian courts. ‘Entrapment is what cops ...”

“... than Walsingham himself. Other names who flit through Fagot’s reports are the malcontent Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, and a young squire named Anthony Babington, who would later become the protagonist of the Babington plot, through which Walsingham at last achieved the entrapment and execution of Mary Stuart. The ...”

“... the committee that he had fired them. Among the writers in question: Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch (authors of the screenplay for Casablanca), Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Clifford Odets and Ring Lardner Jr. This surrender occurred at a key moment, Hoberman says, as reports of flying saucers turned oddly epidemic in the summer of 1947. As for the ...”

“... nicer than I actually find it, which is rather routine, but some of the most memorable passages in Anthony Powell’s Journals and James Lees-Milne’s Diaries are to do with meals, particularly with Lees-Milne’s meals during the war or the years of austerity. Somewhere he talks about a pudding of treacle pancakes and cream which even now makes my mouth ...”

“... was the wording on the landing cards destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. Paulette Wilson, Hubert Howard and the many others whose shocking stories are told in The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman, the journalist whose investigations led to the uncovering of the scandal, came in on their parents’ British passports: from the moment of emancipation in ...”

“... on Mayhew. He’s not a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of ...”

“... start by treating the Royals as ghosts. Yes, we did once love them truly, madly, deeply; but Anthony Minghella’s Zeitgeist movie didn’t just argue that after-images may – perhaps even should – come back to haunt us. The point, surely, was that their sole utility should then be as midwives of a new start, a time that will allow them to cease ...”

“... marry my Lady Garrard’s daughter’ – ‘I saw her and no more.’ At 18, he was offered Kate Howard, but ‘being half afraid of the greatness of her spirit I did not’. At 19, ‘I was wished unto a fine gentlewoman’ – ‘upon further acquaintance I disliked, and did not proceed.’ Finally, in 1613, when he was 22, he took the step (it hardly ...”