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“... to read about the day seven chauffeurs mutinied over their treatment by a sneakily parsimonious cook. Two fussy maiden ladies who asked about the cost of stabling their Austin Seven were told ‘If you care to take it up to your bedroom there will be no charge for garage.’ I do not like to think what he would have told me to do with my sports Morgan ...”

“... through Russia.The first case of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of ...”

“... Carola Dibbell’s astonishing dystopian novel, published in 2015, The Only Ones.) The squire’s cook is disgusted and made resentful by the imminent birth (‘I can tend a death but I’ve no nerve for birth’) and hands in her notice, something her temporary replacement puts down, in a conversation below stairs, to the nearness of her ...”

“... is Last Word, the obituary programme on Radio 4, and The Archive Hour, which on 7 July was about Harold Macmillan – the Night of the Long Knives. This was terrific stuff both in itself, Macmillan always a treat even when he’s being a showman, but also in pointing up the driving down of standards in politics that has occurred since. Taken together with ...”

“... the Swinging Sixties in London but also with the techie progressivism of the Labour Party under Harold Wilson. This imperative led Banham to his first polemic against Pevsner et al’s rationalist reading of Modernist architecture, which was doxa by the time Theory and Design in the First Machine Age appeared. According to Banham, the architects elevated to ...”

“... as others in secret sites around the world). Although at least one senior State Department lawyer, Harold Koh, maintains that the new administration’s changes mean that the United States can now claim that its national security policies are fully compliant with domestic and international law under ‘common and universal standards, not double ...”

“... cavernous kitchens in the basement and of two women who moved about in them – Mrs Benjamin, the cook, who was massive and dressed in butcher’s blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after ...”

“... but in his biography of Auden Humphrey Carpenter gives Kallman’s fancied companion as the poet Harold Norse. Norse thinks Auden was expecting him. The right blond and ready to be just as obliging as Kallman, Norse was a better bet all round. This is one of those moments when three, possibly four lives go rattling over the points. But Norse or Miller? Auden ...”

“... 4 or by Dialectical Materialism or by the Cross of Christ. Etc. etc. etc. Droning & droning. The cook in my professor’s house at Oxford suddenly the other day began cursing Hitler Homerically – ‘I’ll cut out his inside & rub salt in it, I’ll cut off his leg & make him look at it etc.’ The bulk of the post-Oxford letters are practical. They ...”

“... With some notable exceptions early on, like F.O. Matthiessen, Marius Bewley and Leslie Fiedler, in Harold Bloom’s critical admixture of Emerson and Wilde, and in the work now being done by a few young Americanists, this sort of oversight has been par for the course of American studies, where the making of English-American connections is, it seems, suspected ...”

“... Some younger people saw her as a sort of relic – people like the Sitwells and Ronald Firbank and Harold Acton – but all that rather bored her. She was very up to the minute, and would be full of the latest musical comedy or the latest thing that had been written. But she wrote a memoir of Wilde, which I published along with his letters to her in a magazine ...”

“... to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And that is ...”

“... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...”

“... purvey to the Ministry [of Information] the raw meat and vegetables and for the ministry to cook and serve the dish to the public’. At a cabinet meeting, he deplored ‘the unrelieved pessimism’ of BBC bulletins and their ‘long account of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles ...”

“... until his final illness in 1975. As an employee of Lunn Poly, then later Thomson’s and Thomas Cook, Desmond got cheap travel as a perk, and the Fitzgeralds became great takers of package holidays, visiting the Alps in 1965 then Elba, Florence, Turkey, Madrid. The trips were done ‘on a shoestring’, the girls eating the free bread and olive oil in one ...”