“... sense of things to be more nuanced than that. I remember, just after the 1979 election, meeting Alan Fisher of Nupe, who had played the starring role in the Winter of Discontent. ‘A lot of people think,’ he said, with unmistakable pride at being so important, ‘that we really brought down the Labour Government.’ But didn’t he think that thus ...”

“... cavernous kitchens in the basement and of two women who moved about in them – Mrs Benjamin, the cook, who was massive and dressed in butcher’s blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after ...”

“... tiny Suffolk village of Wetherden from St Briavels to Rosemary Cottage. The Tippetts had a live-in cook, parlourmaid and governess, but Isabel made sure her boys were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett ...”

“... humour crewing in a transatlantic yacht race and another to his unsuspected abilities as a gourmet cook, testimonials greeted with incredulity in some sections of the congregation (‘Clive?’) but elsewhere without surprise. A woman said what a good gardener he was and how he had gone on to paint her kitchen, while someone from Woman’s Hour described him ...”

“... depended on who was being asked, how they were being asked, and when. In 1941, Muddy Waters told Alan Lomax he’d never met Johnson. By the 1970s, Waters was saying: ‘I did get to see Robert play a few times.’ Two of the better books written about him, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), and Escaping the ...”

“... and never applied himself to the day-to-day tasks that most people take for granted. He could not cook even the simplest meal; he did not do laundry or wash dishes; he did not make his bed; he was able to drive but hated doing so. He required someone to do these things and, beyond domestic labours, to make arrangements, schedule appointments, help him through ...”

“... entered the national myth of pointless sacrifice and heroic failure. Not quite in the spirit of Alan Bennett’s paradox-mongering media don in The History Boys (‘Those who had been genuinely caught napping by the attack on Pearl Harbor were the Japanese’), Figes suggests that ‘the charge was in some ways a success’ and that Balaklava might even ...”

“... In the months before the election, several Labour advisers took up public affairs jobs. Freddie Cook, a long-serving parliamentary aide, joined Hawthorn Advisers, a lobbying and PR firm co-founded by the former Conservative Party chairman Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who ...”

“... Bowman marries Vivian, whose mother is Caroline, whose father is Warren Wain, whose son is Cook, of whose life we get a tiny vignette before he is dropped, not to reappear. The munificence of access gives All That Is an excitable, digressive quality that sits strangely with the measured, sometimes workaday nature of its narrative of the years, so much ...”

“... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...”

“... so unstable, as to be on the brink of social disintegration, was given by John Stevenson and Chris Cook in The Slump.’ He immediately produces an ‘image’ – one of his book’s 149 illustrations – of the Jarrow Marchers. They look proud and determined. ‘But as the eye pans along to the left and we take in the British bobbie on his bike, this brave ...”

“... a secret from Mrs Ransome who, idly looking at the bookcase one afternoon and wondering what to cook for supper, had seen the title Salmon on Torts and thought it had a vaguely culinary sound to it. She had put the photographs back undisturbed but every few months or so would check to see that they were still there. When they were she felt somehow ...”

“... sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with ...”

“... paralyse your judgment? (I attempted some such mischief in my novel Box Hill.) Discussing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Germaine Greer remarked that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been ...”

“... crisply traces the administrative process from which it emerged:MLS, a private company headed by Alan Rothenberg, received $500,000 from World Cup USA, chaired by Alan Rothenberg, to present its business plan to the US soccer federation, whose president was Alan Rothenberg. USSF, whose ...”