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“... between their outré manners and those of the respectable middle classes. The bowler, as Fred Miller Robinson points out in The Man in the Bowler Hat (1993), had been designed as a riding hat for English horsemen, gamekeepers, hunters, cabmen and others who required the protection of a ‘hard’ hat. It was also perfectly suited as a railway hat: it ...”

“... stories as words are at conveying pictures. An observer who had not already heard the story of David and Goliath would see in the Speculum picture nothing more specific than a king who has just cut off the head of a giant (the latter identified not so much by his size as by his club). Indeed, even if one does already know a story, it is by no means always ...”

“... eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... except their labour. In their 1979 case study of Terling, a village in Essex, Keith Wrightson and David Levine described a massive upward redistribution of wealth between 1525 and 1700, and descriptions of early modern society since theirs have been full of people like Edward Ballard, a ‘pore needy felloe’ with ‘noe certen place of aboad’ living apart ...”

“... glass cabinet flooded with light. Behind the glass stands the flawlessly stuffed body of Mick the Miller, ‘the most famous greyhound this century’, who has been so encased since 1938. Mick was a great winner, the people’s favourite, a dog who carried his day like no other and like no other could today. There have been faster dogs since, souped-up ...”

“... cover depicting Marilyn Monroe mussing his hair had cost him his.)Roth’s first choice was Ross Miller, a friend, professor at the University of Connecticut and nephew of the playwright Arthur Miller. Unfortunately, the neph was no chip off the old oak. Hapless is perhaps the kindest word. A workhorse like Roth could only ...”

“... For three years​ David Blunkett, then the Labour home secretary, had an affair with Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator. The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks later, on Friday 13 August, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, showed up at Blunkett’s office in Sheffield to ask whether he was having an affair with a married woman ...”

“... Such treatment was common. In Grummore, a few miles west of William Chisholm’s farm, an old miller hid in his mill from the men trying to evict him from his house and lay there, licking oatmeal dust from the floor, defended against rats by his collie. The great-grandsons of a Kildonan woman who died in 1907 showed me her photograph – a bulky woman in ...”

“... they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it hasn’t happened can know how peculiarly disagreeable it is to be lampooned in print. But as Goethe said, and I quoted to the famous Jonathan on another occasion: ‘If you don’t want to be ...”

“... Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... is, in every sense, unapproachable and, for the present, inimitable. More might have approved David Hume’s epitaph on utopianism: ‘All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.’ However, for More this would have ...”

“... seeds of an undulate-leaved rhubarb from somewhere east of the Urals: but the claims which Philip Miller was excitedly led to make for what came up from them proved, alas, ill-founded. Linnaeus had better success when he described another rhubarb from Russia as Rheum palmatum in 1750: with the backing of his authority this was to remain Europe’s favourite ...”

“... BBC producers, all anxious about the way one used one’s voice, but I returned to print when Karl Miller took over at the Spectator, then at the New Statesman, then at the Listener, and then right here. I wrote occasionally for the Sundays and quite often for American journals, so I suppose I am or was one of the race of grubbing professors, though a very ...”