“... and executive suites dreamed up by Rayne and financed by the Church Commissioners. The Rev. Kenneth Bartlett, who became vicar of St James’s Church in Sussex Gardens in 1963, infuriated the Commissioners by likening them to the slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman, Bartlett said, had made life difficult for a few hundred people, the Church ...”

“... touching institutions that enjoyed wide public support. She was, for example, much less ready than Kenneth Clarke to reform the NHS. The enforced sale of council housing was part of her original programme, but it was assumed to be risk-free and had long been contemplated by the party. It was the success of the privatisation – a word she did not particularly ...”

“... river called, in Masai, ‘Nairobi’, meaning ‘cold water’, and drove on to Lake Victoria. As Kenneth Cameron puts it, ‘East Africa had become safariland.’ I was disappointed not to see Cameron’s book on sale in Nairobi. East African safari is a topic designed to produce jaunty reading for expats and tourists. But, while Cameron’s treatment is ...”

“... the family have to be taken away to a place of safety; the boy is later released. The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds ...”

“... Lowe tells the story of pissing herself as a child ‘in the bathroom line at a community hall dance’, as ‘all the while, the boys’ bathroom door hung ajar, the light on, the room unoccupied. I could literally see the toilet. Not a single girl in that line made a move.’ The first flushing public toilets were installed at the Great Exhibition ...”

“... Morrison’), and they were very much in love. And so, to outward appearances, they remained. Did Kenneth Grahame, who also supported a fairly enigmatic marriage, write The Wind in the Willows for his little boy as a result? Milne turned it into popular dramatic form as Toad of Toad Hall, but despite superficial resemblance ...”

“... murderous teenagers of Heavenly Creatures as ‘the most hideous man alive’, matches wits with Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier in Austin Pendleton’s play Orson’s Shadow, and has even been fingered posthumously as a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Welles appears, larger than life, in documentaries and dramatisations, of both his own story ...”

“... up his quarrels with the dean and chapter at York, he seemed perpetually compelled to quit Shandy Hall. Sometimes it is health trips of increasingly unhopeful prognosis; sometimes it is the assemblies at Harrogate, the races at York, the small-town amenities of Scarborough. Of course there are the greater fleshpots of London and Paris: at the start of this ...”

“... mismatch of Abbott and Costello and closer to the exasperated camaraderie of Laurel and Hardy; as Kenneth Tynan put it, they were ‘no longer comic and stooge, but egoists in more or less equal competition’. They still told jokes and performed in sketches that required only caricature-acting, but now their roles were blurring to the point at which they ...”

“... when one is most tempted to do so. Tilly’s shorthand for this approach is to quote the great Kenneth Burke’s insistence that what words for motives describe are situations not inner states. Which is all you need to know if you want to drop the whole idea of inwardness, and talk instead of social dramas. Tilly is eager to equate ‘avowal and ...”

“... from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote about each picture painted by Brooks, her long-term ...”

“... R.W. Chambers, Robert Bolt and the Catholic church. By contrast the More of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for ...”

“... contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is defied by Kenneth Toomey in his ‘arresting opening’ to Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me ... ’ And Toomey’s bedfellow maliciously warns his ...”

“... Club, Conservative Central Office, Daily Mail leader writer). He escorted Elizabeth to Pakenham Hall and Dunsany Castle, home of Uncle Eddie (‘Lord Insany’). The courtship, though beset by difficulties, was virtuous; once, invited by hosts to share a room, they resorted to ‘bundling’, with a bolster down the middle of the bed. At last came a good ...”

“... milieux and began teaching adult education classes. From 1903 to 1906, Tawney lived at Toynbee Hall, where well-meaning graduates undertook social work in the East End of London. But, as he quickly realised, he had no aptitude for doling out ‘soup and blankets’ to the ‘demoralised’ poor of Whitechapel. Charity wasn’t a solution to the crisis of ...”