“... and put together in interesting ways. Everyone played chess: Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much ...”

“... Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing ...”

“... which somehow continue to animate US politics, were his birthright. Once the field was cleared of lesser lights like Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina, he would bring about a future of Republican national majorities by bringing swelling numbers of Hispanics into the tent. The dominance of this narrative was enough to make you feel sympathy ...”

“... which would enable the nation’s champions to sail back and forth without being fouled by the lesser movements of their fellow citizens. Though it sounded implausible at the time, Archer’s proposal was in line with the more baroque – perhaps pre-Cameronian – tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour ...”

“... when international affairs are the arena of vanity par excellence. Another victim of it was Margaret Thatcher, ditched for neglecting her party while she affixed her signature to the Paris Charter. Her condolences to Gorbachev were more than fitting. It is no accident that the two most successful political machines of the postwar world, which in 45 ...”

“... a religion in its own right. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), a book she knew well, Margaret Murray had advanced the far more radical view that European witches were the inheritors of a ‘joyous’ pre-Christian fertility cult in which women had always played a prominent organising role. Although it was rare for the fertility rites in which ...”

“... which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’ If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook. How would you go about dividing Emerson’s grief into components? There seems to be no bargaining and no anger in ...”

“... not to be found in the Convention. In the final years of the Cold War, the Commission legitimised Margaret Thatcher’s decision to ban unions at GCHQ by finding that this breach in freedom of association had been ‘necessary in a democratic society’. Similar reasoning led to the dismissal of claims from both British and Irish applicants that the media ...”

“... especially the Russian, people; on the success of the nationalist movements’ demands; and (to a lesser extent) on what assistance the West can give. Even on official figures, which no one believes, growth in National Material Product (roughly equivalent to production without services) has declined from over 7 per cent a year in the Sixties and Seventies to ...”

“... crowds. Raisa and he had already begun to travel: first to Italy and then to London, where he and Margaret Thatcher had famously hit it off (‘We can do business together’). But in Moscow he began his changes only slowly, uncertainly. Another rush of Taubman questions: why didn’t he launch a crash programme for consumer goods, why didn’t he go straight ...”

“... the path for a system of his own: the myth of the ‘Cockney visionary’ – a phrase which to lesser beings, or those fated to live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he ...”

“... formal responsibilities and sits in an 18th-century town hall on the high street. Powell was the lesser mayor, and it rankled. It still does. Being mayor number two, he had to stand behind the borough mayor at municipal events. ‘The second-fiddle aspects,’ he said, as he drove me back from Witts’s house. ‘They opened a new heritage centre down the ...”

“... it encouraged the later schemes of Fulton and Bell). Compared with Symington, Bell was the lesser engineer and the greater enthusiast, the better talker and the bolder fibber.Hoping to combine public interest in two relatively new phenomena, steam navigation and sea bathing, Bell commissioned the Comet partly to convey customers to his hotel at the new ...”

“... Henrietta Maria as a bubbly twin of Princess Diana, and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the ...”

“... because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser extent) Raymond Mortimer did. The only time I met Connolly was in 1968 – when my first play, Forty Years On, was in Brighton on its pre-West End tour. He was mentioned in the text, where it was implied he was quite short, as I’d thought he was ...”