“... The Queen smiled back at the unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of ...”

“... abandoned the requirement that Friends observe ‘plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel’. Edward Fry accepted the previously unthinkable worldly honour of a knighthood. George Cadbury moved into a mansion with thirty servants. In the 1930s, when Rowntree scandalised the Cadburys and the Frys by trying to patent industrial processes – some Victorian ...”

“... Sitwell enthuses over a song about Havana night life. As late as 1959, the British historian Hugh Thomas recognised that Cuba was one of the few tropical countries to have created a modern culture of its own. He also noticed that Fidel Castro owed his power not to guerrilla warfare, as he had believed before visiting Cuba, but to television. The way Castro ...”

“... person yet,’ he said. ‘It will be the book you can write now.’ He wanted his book to be like Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. I noticed he tended to eat pretty much with his hands. People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands. He turned ...”

“... inactive in the face of so much ‘corruption’. But that is the lot of many activist groupings. Edward Daffarn, a resident from the 16th floor who wrote many emails to the council, and Francis O’Connor, who wrote many of the blogs, were committed local agitators with a deep disgust at what the council and its TMO was failing to do for the poorer people of ...”