“... individuals, press lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice. For short-term tactical ...”

“... first birthday there neighbours presented her with what she describes in a letter to Ilse and Kit Barker as her ‘lifelong dream – a toucan’: He has brilliant, electric-blue eyes, grey-blue legs and feet. Most of him is black, except the base of the enormous bill is green and yellow and he has a bright gold bib and bunches of red feathers on his stomach ...”

“... The Merchant of Venice in 1970, he says, Olivier turned up with a hook nose and goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal ...”

“... culture and its relationship to the environment and concluded: “We were the gooks.”’ Major George Bonville was dismayed by the excesses of some Americans, one of them in his own team: Old papa-sans were getting killed by ambushes or patrols for just getting up in the dark of night and wandering out of their huts to take a leak. When a child might get ...”

“... it as ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’, and 1914, when Granville Barker tried to dispense with the scenic display that generations of spectacular musical versions had imposed, ‘the play that Shakespeare wrote’ emerges in a powerful and startlingly different light.The major beneficiary of such a re-vision is the character ...”

“... care. Social care budgets, outsourced and administered through local authorities, collapsed during George Osborne’s austerity decade. In October, the County Councils Network, representing 36 mostly Tory administrations, warned of care providers abandoning contracts, chronic staff shortages and an impending £3.7 billion in additional costs as a result of ...”

“... in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered ...”

“... extent of its political capture by oligarch money. The former Conservative energy minister Greg Barker and the onetime Labour attorney general Peter Goldsmith have both taken leaves of absence from the House of Lords, which means their work for Russian interests does not have to be declared on the public record.London has an enabling industry of ...”

“... now 48. Somebody should write about women obsessed with the First World War. Everybody knows Pat Barker, of course, but there’s also Lyn Macdonald – a former BBC producer whose dense, addictive, exhaustively researched oral histories of the war (1914: The Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No ...”