“... of court, among many other political reverses. The current incumbent at the Home Office, Michael Howard, has been able to rely on the example set by his tenacious predecessor when resisting calls for his resignation after similar tumultuous events. There is at least a kind of naked honesty about such determined ambition. In the early Conservative era, the ...”

“... treasurer. The Schools were accommodated in the Queen’s Gallery, built (allegedly from an Inigo Jones design) for the widowed Henrietta Maria. On the principal floor were the grand ‘plaister academy’ and the library. There was no studio for architecture and the students were expected to make their drawings at home or in whatever architect’s office ...”

“... range’ of the party’s new parliamentary candidates, he began to tell me about Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. I hadn’t heard of him. ‘You should meet him,’ the MP said. A press officer cut in. ‘He’s a Devon farmer, who set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to ...”

“... catastrophe), A Taste of Honey (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Tom Jones (1963), in between visits to direct plays on Broadway and Pericles at Stratford. From 1959 he could hardly be said to have been actively responsible for the running of the theatre or to have had an intimate knowledge of its day-to-day workings, so it is ...”

“... our flesh’s sextant sets ... This churning is our journey. But we already have the wonderful Howard Nemerov – whose voice is heard throughout – for this kind of mild civic editorial. Updike may not, in truth, know how to write poetry; but his deep talent is such that even the slightest poem rarely flows away without leaving some valuable deposit. As ...”

“... read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I ...”

“... from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements with Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, walk-on grotesques as far as Amis was concerned – and can’t have been pleased by hints here and there of Larkin’s reservations about the Amis works and life. In Amis’s correspondence with Conquest, and more covertly in his Memoirs ...”

“... Forest? The long-haired freak who shoots up Coca-Cola in ‘Come Together’ is, of course, Howard Hughes. And did you ever notice that the famous Abbey Road cover shot is centred around a vanishing point?Again, it’s hard to think of anything comparable involving the Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ...”

“... of the plays by the political dramatists of the 1970s, including Trevor Griffiths’s Occupations, Howard Brenton’s Magnificence, David Hare’s Plenty and much of my own work. Nearly twenty years on from those plays, the climax of Hare’s The Absence of War (1993) consists of the leader of the Labour Party, facing defeat in a general election, trying to ...”

“... been in charge of both). But we can’t be sure. Before he joined the agency another head of MI5, Howard Smith, apparently advocated killing Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; this happened in 1960. ‘Still,’ Walton concludes, ‘the question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba, or other troublesome leaders who died in suspicious ...”

“... Walter Raleigh. Arundel House, the most gorgeous palace of them all, was acquired by Alethea Howard and her husband, the earl of Arundel. These patrons of the arts exposed their ‘jewells of art to publicke view’ – these ‘jewells’ being a peerless library, Greek and Roman sculptures, seventeen Raphaels and a garden designed by Inigo ...”

“... struggles, or was brought about by the cataclysm of 1914-1918. Another article, by Christopher Howard, details the Labour Party’s failure in the 1920s to expand local organisation and mass membership. It was the familiar story of small dedicated groups whose exertions ‘bore no little resemblance to the labours of Sisyphus’, and frustration fanned the ...”

“... failed. He ‘discovered’ the 21-year-old Phyllis Walker, née Isley, renamed her ‘Jennifer Jones’, and suggested her as the saintly heroine of The Song of Bernadette. Later, he recast her – as the sultry Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, otherwise ‘Lust in the Dust’. Finally, he married her. Perhaps, behind all the business acumen and concern ...”

“... comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and ...”

“... his experience of the demi-monde and the down-and-out in pre and postwar France so that, as Colin Jones (another former student) put it, ‘the poor, the destitute, the marginal, the outsider, the delinquent, the criminal, the unmarried mother, the prostitute’ became enfranchised in his narratives. Cobb, it was said, put the pimp into the Scarlet ...”