“... medieval wall-paintings. It’s an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock ...”

“... November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and ...”

“... and Ray Honeyford (the former Bradford headmaster). It seems equally fruitless to complain of Roy Kerridge, a persuasive journalist whose picturesque remarks about blacks seem always to offend them, and of a journalist called ‘the Angry Voice’ in the Daily Star. Some of these men are quite skilled sophists and coat-trailers: to respond to their ...”

“... this so? The answer is probably to be found in the entry of 22 November 1979, where he writes (of Roy Jenkins’s Dimbleby Lecture): ‘Of course there always has been a centre party in British politics in the 20th century: it is made up of Butskellites, including Macmillan, Callaghan, Wilson and Heath at one stage. It is ...”

“... Kinnock distinguished himself with a rousing speech against joining on the sole ground that Heath was in favour. After a few early contributions, he largely ignored the House of Commons (his lack of experience there is only now a handicap): instead he concentrated on building a reputation in the party in the country, speaking in practically every ...”

“... That is the basis of Steel’s strategy. After the General Election of February 1974 Edward Heath, faced with the prospect of heading a minority government, discussed with the then Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe the possibility of some sort of coalition. But Steel reports that it was ‘the almost universal opinion’ of Liberal MPs that no such offer ...”

“... detail, Dick’s are by far the best. This is not to say that they are the most truthful – Roy Jenkins has declared that Barbara’s are more accurate. Nor does it mean that they give the most effective picture of how it was to be there. They are simply the best read, and by a long, long way. What is extraordinary about the Crossman diaries, and ...”

“... on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of the Foreign Office induce a Venetian ...”

“... by Honderich to disallow books by all practising politicians, were it not that he does include Roy Hattersley and Gordon Brown. Much the same happens with work by non-politicians. Two very good non-extremist studies, Anthony Quinton’s The Politics of Imperfection and Noel O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, appear, but they are almost alone. Norton and ...”

“... Gates, near Birmingham, during the miners’ strike of 1974, widely credited with destroying the Heath Government. Mass picketing by miners at Saltley, supported on the crucial day of closure by several thousand demonstrators from Birmingham, succeeded in closing the gates of an important coke depot. Scargill has given a vivid account of that day in later ...”

“... to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was another admired colleague/bugbear. To Douglas in 1945 he describes him as ‘arse over tippett’; to Walter Legge in 1975 he ...”

“... by reading some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency ...”

“... remained law well into the 19th century. Nine clauses survived the Victorian tidying up, until Roy Jenkins in 1965 set up the Law Commission, which carried out a further winnowing. Even today we still have Clause 40 about not selling, denying or delaying justice, and Clause 39, that no free man is to be imprisoned or dispossessed ‘save by the lawful ...”

“... of political action topography has its place. There was a difference between Hounslow, a wild heath of gibbets, enclosures and a cavalry barracks, and Windsor, a seat of royal authority. David Bromwich will take the point about Windsor, for he has an excellent discussion of Burke’s Tory eulogy of Windsor, explaining why Hazlitt liked it so much and how ...”

“... of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its ...”