“... He had written to many of the notables of the day to tell them the good news – a mixed bag: Winston Churchill, Semprini, Wilfred Pickles, Val Doonican – and he would show you a sheaf of their acknowledgments. ‘He’s batchy,’ Dad would say, meaning ‘he’s barmy,’ but it certainly kept him happy.7 February. Ploughing on with the Francis Bacon ...”

“... thing. I was just screaming. Listen to “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”’ – a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘Don’t get the therapy confused with the music.’ And what’s true (and ‘simple’ and ‘real’) of the voice is also true of the instrument: How do you rate yourself as a guitarist? Well, it ...”

“... recent scandalous split from his wife, Sarah Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter. (Winston Churchill had always been appalled by the marriage and described Oliver as ‘common as dirt’.) That’s not to say there was no subtext. Oliver was Jewish and said to be on a Nazi blacklist. His final choice of record, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, made ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men ...”

“... vote deploring his actions after a robust condemnation of Dyer by the secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill. Eleven days later in the House of Lords, as always on the wrong side, the government was defeated by 129 to 86, despite the sinewy arguments advanced by the lord chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. In the 1920s and 1930s, Birkenhead and Churchill were ...”

“... to artistically unschooled violon d’Ingres types like D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Schoenberg, Winston Churchill and Prince Charles – talented amateur painters, possibly, but not exactly what you would call marginal or psychically alienated figures. Euphemistic, in turn, because once again the sheer intransigence of outsider art – its ...”

“... humiliations, yet his demeanour was almost always chatty and confident. That, perhaps, is why Winston Churchill could say on several occasions: ‘I really loved that man.’ Churchill reserved his deepest admiration for men of courage and FDR, for all his faults, was brave beyond measure. In Roosevelt’s era there was a real stigma attached to ...”

“... public sector supply chain’. The trick is not to say this in public. Soames – a grandson of Winston Churchill and brother of the former Conservative minister Nicholas Soames – has cautioned his managers to ensure that staff behave in a way that would satisfy the ‘Daily Mail test’. (The same metric was adopted by the civil servants making funding ...”

“... this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the talk of Scotland being more radical than England and of the nation being predisposed towards left-of-centre redistributive policies, these characteristics have not really manifested themselves in any meaningful ...”

“... years included George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, H.G. Wells, Mary Pickford, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin – even Gandhi. David’s prolonged exposure to celebrities in his childhood meant that they held no fear for him as an adult. Sometimes, when Nancy got unusually loud or agitated, her husband would squeeze the back of her neck ...”

“... on publishing, lawyers on the law, copyright experts on copyright, Sir James Pitman on shorthand, Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline as well as praise). His ...”

“... poem was written against a rising tide of mob lynchings in the American South. When Winston Churchill appeared before the US Congress petitioning for American support in the darkest hours of World War Two, he quoted from it without acknowledging the author:If we must die – let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While ...”

“... of life handed down’ from its ancestors – threatened. But at moments of what Walzer, following Winston Churchill, calls ‘supreme emergency’, a leader may have to commit the most obscene crimes in order to avert catastrophe. The deliberate murder of innocents, the use of torture: the measures taken will be as many and almost as terrible as the evils a ...”