“... slanted towards the book’s central preoccupation with explaining a slaveholding worldview. Like Michael O’Brien, in his Conjectures of Order (2004), the Genoveses are exasperated with the tendency of historians to dismiss Southerners as anti-intellectual, provincial or crassly materialistic. Unlike O’Brien, they suggest that slavery was the phenomenon ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... a stickler’s commitment to detail, complete with flourishes and stylised impatience à la Perry Mason – a characteristic that becomes less mannered as he runs out of time in a cross-examination. Then, too, he does good deadpan and good put-upon. When Halit Berisha, an Albanian municipal official from Suva Reka, in the north of Kosovo, testified about the ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American proverb, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ It seems to throw light on the difficult case of Dryden. During ...”

“... glass and progressive holes in the ground. The darkened showroom of the Brick Lane monumental mason with the Jewish headstones will be an art gallery. So? The Victorian theatre on Dalston Lane is already a windblown concrete slab with optional water jets propping up a reef of speculative towers nobody can afford on a buttress of failed enterprises, themed ...”

“... Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to the consumer DNA tests and paywalled online databases of today. Genealogy became ...”

“... some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also ...”

“... less ruthless, for being ‘de facto’ rather than ‘de jure’. As Malcolm X remarked, ‘the Mason-Dixon line begins at the Canadian border.’In 1964 even Nina Simone, no racial optimist, could sing ‘Old Jim Crow, don’t you know, it’s all over now!’ But in the early 1990s, many blacks started to wonder if they were becoming victims of a new Jim ...”

“... of ‘real journalists, not just celebrity columnists’. The Battle had its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free ...”

“... to get back in. A nightmare, my own: to be locked in a dark, stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion in the European Economic Area, in the ...”

“... as well as a small Stilton cheese in a china jar. This had been purchased at Fortnum and Mason, on the recommendation of my Chilean friend Claudio Véliz, the Latin American specialist at Chatham House. He thought it would be a suitable present for Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the éminence grise of the Cuban Communist Party. Latin American Communists ...”

“... of the word ‘bloody’. He then named a 23-year-old Trinity College Dublin graduate student, Michael Clear, who quickly denied it. The story went nowhere and Clear went back to his studies. Then Leah McGrath Goodman wrote a piece for Newsweek claiming Satoshi was a maths genius called Dorian Nakamoto, who lived in the Californian suburb of Temple City ...”