“... shorn inevitably of his time-bound commitments to Empire and its protective external tariff wall – includes a robust statism and a commitment to the general welfare of the people. It lurks behind the curious manifesto of 2017. This late 19th-century Unionist renovation of Conservatism is one of the principal subjects of Emily Jones’s surprising and ...”

“... poofters?’ The Pacesetters stuck pictures of male nudes up on what became known as the ‘Willie Wall’; the Sun began to run its regular pornographic ‘Page Three’ photograph in November 1970. Pictures would go from the picture desk to the photographic department to be retouched, ‘with scribbled instructions to “remove mole” or “make jawline ...”

“... Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a comic book of the filmscript of Syberberg’s Hitler, or a bag of (used) truncheons for sale. Once ensconced in the plane, a smiling hostess hands one a copy of Esquire for April ...”

“... and covered with bruises, the other patients having duffed him up for tearing a crucifix off the wall – there’s a rich slice of Polish life and Polish film in the tale of Comrade Arct. What matters more than the people is the vigour of the whole environment. This was a special generation in the Eastern Europe of the late Fifties. Its members had seen and ...”

“... with a bar running all along one side of it and some tables and a few divans. The windows in the wall opposite the bar were all open, but they looked out onto a well, so that the room was really quite stuffy and there was a smell of ammonia. Several people they knew were sitting at tables or up at the bar, but they found a place to themselves in the corner ...”

“... it spells SEMIT, which leads them to deduce that we are a Jewish-Marxist organisation.’ Geoffrey Dawson, the editor, and a keen appeaser, was dismayed that his paper had been responsible for an increase in international tension. He stood behind Steer rather reluctantly. ‘I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that ...”

“... she expressed it,” he recalled.’ That was Thatcher all over, as even such slavish acolytes as Geoffrey Ripon gradually discovered. She exalted rags-to-riches entrepreneurialism but the launch of her career depended on her having married a wealthy older man able to pay for childcare and make it unnecessary for her to earn her own living. It should come as ...”

“... important males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little ...”

“... like an oil price shock (or a rise in indirect taxes such as the 7 per cent increase in VAT in Sir Geoffrey Howe’s 1979 Budget) shifts the price level upwards, transitional unemployment will have to be long and severe before wages and finished-product prices are marked down enough to return to the original inflation rate. At an international level, the ...”

“... wore on, Roman-occupied Britain was hit by a string of attacks from the other side of Hadrian’s Wall, with Picts and Scots increasingly working in conjunction with Saxon and Frankish sea-raiders. The attacks came (and here we have good textual evidence) in 343, 360, 367, 396-98. The military coped with them fairly well, but what was harder to take – and ...”

“... 11. It was a tall terraced house which the family extended yet further upwards, and if the front wall had been removed the interior would have revealed, like a slightly sinister dolls’ house, a stratified model of late Victorian society. In the basement and the attics were the servants, while in between were Julia and Leslie Stephen and the extended family ...”

“... like an unmade bed. I find less and less in them to read and feel like somebody stood against a wall while a parade goes by. An article in the Garden, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘Making Sense of the Celandine’. 11 March. Depressed by an item glimpsed on TV last night revealing that Railtrack, to save itself money (and the problems ...”

“... the call of nature, and run. For anybody unfortunate enough to get caught, pinned against a garage wall in darkest New Haven, and confronted with imminent deconstruction, I suppose the only choice is to try talking one’s way out with a simple-minded deconstructionist confession – something roughly along the following lines perhaps. There is (one might ...”

“... case, since the historically pro-Shah and pro-colonial forces, as represented by politicians like Geoffrey Howe and George Bush and business spokesman like Lord Shawcross, have found themselves able to resist the allure of The Satanic Verses and even to anticipate with a writhe of embarrassment its effect on the tender parts of the Ayatollah. Anyway, when it ...”

“... early poems gave me enormous trouble when I was an undergraduate. Confident teachers spoke of Geoffrey Grigson’s advice to Thirties poets to ‘report well. Begin with objects and events.’ These poets were socially concerned, we were told; they were tempted by Communism, wanted to open some negotiation with popular culture, and to include the ...”