“... start by treating the Royals as ghosts. Yes, we did once love them truly, madly, deeply; but Anthony Minghella’s Zeitgeist movie didn’t just argue that after-images may – perhaps even should – come back to haunt us. The point, surely, was that their sole utility should then be as midwives of a new start, a time that will allow them to cease ...”

“... carry the People in their rucksacks. Primus inter people is the founding director of Charter 88, Anthony Barnett, whose book attempts to recapture for his constitutionalist tendency the drama of ‘our constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially ...”

“... to Hollywood. Back in England she fell ‘instantly’ in love with the 33-year-old film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, marrying him three years later. They had two sons; the older one had Down’s syndrome and the other is a judge. She never criticised Havelock-Allan, but David, evidently rightly, thinks he was ‘a selfish husband and a ...”

“... her, when one’s baby-sitter is a cabinet minister one realises one is really old!21 May 1997. Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy ...”

“... Forest? The long-haired freak who shoots up Coca-Cola in ‘Come Together’ is, of course, Howard Hughes. And did you ever notice that the famous Abbey Road cover shot is centred around a vanishing point?Again, it’s hard to think of anything comparable involving the Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ...”

“... Anthony Trollope once proposed to write ‘a history of English prose fiction’, but ‘broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect ...”

“... Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan ...”

“... very strange cultural places. Any time I heard that, say, David Bowie was only really imitating Anthony Newley, I immediately lost interest in David Bowie and went looking for the source, sometimes with the pitiable results that this example suggests. So I was always moving backwards through time, and though I was born in 1964 and came to cultural ...”

“... feeling of being watched that lingers throughout life. And the feeling it engenders is escape.’ Howard Hughes, a megalomaniac solitary with a horror of being watched, was familiar to Ryan from his dealings with RKO, and he seems to have supplied the master-clue to the portrayal of the tycoon Smith Ohlrig in Caught. A suggestion of violence suffuses the ...”

“... to be mightily and diligently looked into and cared for.’ On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means sure that the danger ...”

“... you meet a broad canvas painted four years later. This tumultuous pictorial poem was delivered by Anthony Van Dyck within a few months of his arrival in London from Antwerp in 1632, and its theme is royal romance. It shows Charles and Henrietta Maria half-length, their hands swapping wreaths – he turning dog-devotedly to his tough, swish and altogether ...”

“... of old, a view strongly shared by Leonard Larsen in an outspoken commentary for the US Scripps Howard News Service. We point to the obvious differences, and everybody finally agrees that Israel’s contempt for non-Israeli lives, its brutal occupations and enthusiasm for collective punishments, are sufficiently abhorrent without being heightened by ...”

“... City by selling to its new arts centre for $50,000 a huge painting entitled The Temptation of St Anthony which consists of a single vertical stripe on a plain ground, utters a startling self-defence: It is a picture of the self-awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all ...”

“... By the early 1950s the Tory Party seemed to require bloody renewal of this sort. Would Anthony Eden wield the knife against its leader, the elderly and infirm Winston Churchill? For Churchill, who was further debilitated by a stroke in 1953, was resolute on one subject: that he would not cede the premiership to Eden. At last, Eden became leader and ...”

“... Portrait Gallery has a fine snapshot (taken by Colin Matthew) of the architectural historian Howard Colvin in the ruins of Godstow Abbey: spectacles pushed up on his forehead, camera dangling from one hand, he looks down intently as he makes a neat entry in the notebook he has just fished from his pocket. I have always been impressed by those academics ...”