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“... the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers. He was in the private sitting room of Number Ten when Ramsay MacDonald returned from the palace on resigning. He belonged to Chamberlain’s magic circle of ...”

“... in what is today Turkey, by al-Jazari. The little mechanical man was supposed to pick up a ball every hour and drop it into a dragon’s mouth. Saladin (who died in 1193) would hardly have been the right model for this rather menial job. (Incidentally, this ‘portrait of Saladin’ has done the rounds and features in quite a number of popular ...”

“... rather than restrict it. A sentence like ‘It was to be the last Royal Pavilion Midsummer Ball until the peace’ holds out (from our point of view) a reasonable expectation of resumption, while for people at the time it meant the indefinite and very likely permanent suspension of the life they had known. When the first fifty-kilogramme bomb is ...”

“... record. That currently belongs to Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, who in 2001 hit the ball out of the park an unprecedented 73 times. McGwire, Sosa and Bonds don’t resemble Roger Maris in physical appearance, but they don’t look much like Babe Ruth either. They are all large, heavy-set men, but no one could call them fat: the extra weight is ...”

“... Tony Blair said on 14 July. ‘As a sovereign nation, Israel has every right to defend itself,’ George W. Bush said on 16 July. By the time these statements were made, the IDF had bombed Beirut’s international airport, destroyed roads, bridges, power stations and petrol stations, and imposed an air and sea blockade. The Israeli army chief of ...”

“... Or perhaps a tribute to it. There are pictures of rooms, a car tyre, an exercise book and a golf ball. Right at the end are paintings in which graded tints show hills rising out of mist with a tiny kitsch-Oriental boat or bridge in the foreground. But only by going back to the original moment – the moment when Life magazine headed an article, ‘Is He the ...”

“... boots, they led one of the first 1970s revivals in the 1980s: pop veterans such as ABC and Boy George soon borrowed from their palette and repertoire. Taboo, however, was about more than style: the club was part of Bowery’s larger ambition to provoke. To Dada, Warhol’s Factory and the films of Waters, we might add to the list of Bowery’s influences ...”

“... Harry Graham ruthlessness in the stories. The hyena which the girl wishes to take her place at the ball in her story ‘The Debutante’ is direct:       ‘You’re very lucky,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go. I don’t know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk.’       ‘There’ll be a great many different things to eat,’ I ...”

“... 10 per cent to 9.6. Year-on-year listening was down by 700,000 ... At breakfast time, Greening and Ball had lost 82,000 ... while Chris Evans [now at a rival station] had risen by 234,000. Such fidelity to mundane facts requires an element of selflessness, and Garfield has that to a fault. He is not a former DJ. He has never worked at Radio 1. He does not ...”

“... He unveils a somewhat less than visionary plan of action for Israel-Palestine: ‘We kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve.’ He discloses his blueprint for economic recovery, which is that the mere fact of his election will stimulate business, and gloats through a long story about a prison-like ...”

“... them. Late in 1833, Gell guided round the sites the rich, well-born novelist and politician Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, with his termagant of an Irish wife. The spoiled child of a doting mother, Bulwer – he added his mother’s maiden name of Lytton to his own – had had a desultory education, part of it at Cambridge, had experienced a romantic tragedy and ...”

“... it makes. What with his success in the theatre and the suc·cès d'es·time of his novels the ball at this point of the Thirties seemed to have landed at Hamilton’s feet. After various hopeless passions, of the kind that Bob in his trilogy feels for the prostitute Jenny, he had unexpectedly married a sensible girl called Lois, a few years older than ...”

“... he spent time with, even in his palmiest days, were not social butterflies but fellow artists like George Sand and Chopin, and school friends who had become civil servants. Yet his intellectual isolation should not be underestimated. Wilson-Smith’s chapter describing Delacroix’s friendship with Chopin and ...”

“... kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in Dublin. The tone is oddly like that of someone who is eager to reassure an older sister of his orthodox sexual ...”

“... Chula, who had been a Cambridge undergraduate when Runciman was a young don at Trinity. At a ball in Bangkok a dazzling young woman waved at him and he asked Chula who she was. ‘But you met him the other day. That is the Minister for Education.’ Unfortunately, discretion overcomes him where our own Royal Family is concerned: I seem to remember him ...”