“... of convention. That said, the books are hardly subversive. Father is in the Navy, where John and Roger expect to follow him. Mate Susan, caring and cooking, is training herself for middle-class wifehood. Her mother, though reared in the Australian outback, is (unlike Ransome’s remarkable second wife) very content to employ servants. Through Slump ...”

“... message as well as its method,’ says Edna Longley): ‘Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade/ Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade.’ With the line, ‘One of the Lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’, we get a topical piece of ambiguity: the poem was written in 1915, when Thomas had already enlisted (he was killed at Arras in 1917). Thomas set out ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V ...”

“... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...”

“... to ‘Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and even Agatha Christie’. The imaginary kingdom of Prester John which forms the main theme of Gumilev’s study refers, not to the legend of a Christian king beyond the domains of Islam as it developed in Europe, but to the existence from time to time of Christian nomad leaders in Central Asia, rumours of whose exploits ...”

“... And here also was a good test, because Thatcher had attacked the two-party consensus on the Smith-Muzorewa deal, suggesting that if elected she would lift sanctions on Salisbury.At once we were in an argument. Of Joshua Nkomo I remember her saying: ‘I think Joshua is absolutely sweet.’ That was the least of our disagreements. On one point of ...”

“... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also ...”

“... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...”

“... a marauding Danish general, kicked his head around in triumph. Conversely, the public hanging of John Platts outside Derby County Jail in April 1847 drew a crowd of twenty thousand – descendants of the ‘seething mob’ that played Shrove Tuesday football. When the FA was founded in 1863 it knew it was in direct competition for crowd support with public ...”

“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... our obligations to suit our inclinations, rather in the way that, in Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood and his wife Fanny gradually persuade themselves that the large sum of money John had promised to support his stepmother and half-sisters really ought, in the best interests of everyone involved, to be reduced to ...”

“... than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on art of the past half-century. The ...”

“... are William Gaskill’s superb revivals of The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem, John Dexter’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Coward’s Hay Fever, Stoppard’s Jumpers, Clifford Williams’s all-male As you like it, and Olivier’s own productions of Three Sisters and Juno and the Paycock. All of those, I’m sure, were Tynan’s ...”

“... the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way through the press conference ...”