“... the clip and gather the leftover scraps. Once the wool was off, it needed to be washed. Christine Cooper had to cull ‘about seven todds of very coarse and feeble tarry’ wool from tegs, scouring off the tar and sorting it for carding. The wool wasted in the process was called ‘twickings’ – another chance for the gleaners. Once carded and the fibres ...”

“... I seem to think best in collision with other people’s thoughts. In a biography of Lady Diana Cooper, once said to be the most beautiful woman in England and by many accounts one of the most wittily charming, I read a snippet from one of Lady Diana’s letters to a friend: It’s not my nature to be quiet. I have no wealth within me. All stimulus has to ...”

“... its competence – was ‘born unfree’. Staggering in its own way is the acute perception of Sir William Wade, who held chairs in law at both Oxford and Cambridge, that the Union was originally understood to be the ‘fundamental law’ of the new British state, but ‘the Treaty was made too early, and the argument has been raised too late, for this ...”

“... they unmask their batteries, and we find that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William Jackson, GBE KCB MC MA, and Field Marshal Lord Bramall KG GCB OBE MC JP (JP indeed!). No artillery comes heavier than that. The title is also a little misleading: our generals tell the story, not just of ‘the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff’, as they ...”

“... big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and John Wayne (who wasn’t a star until this movie made him one). Dietrich and Cooper would have turned Dallas and Ringo into the natural aristocrats that Ford didn’t ...”

“... didn’t take long for him to become spectacularly successful. In 1953, he starred on Broadway in William Inge’s Picnic, in which he was ‘stiff and wooden but an actor’, according to the film director Sidney Lumet. John Foreman told Stern that every studio wanted him after that, and he officially became the ‘hot guy’. Over the next few years he just ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... Kennedy spoke to just before he was shot – ‘He was always alert for a glimpse of Sisters,’ William Manchester says with unconscious irony – re-lives and reconstructs that day in November 1963, teaches history to her pupils as an immediate and bewildering experience. Oswald gets ready, thinks he is to kill Governor Connally, not Kennedy; David ...”

“... and intolerance.In March 1706, in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote excitedly to the Swiss biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc. ‘There is,’ he declared, ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon whom the affairs ...”

“... removal of the chains of lunatics at Bicêtre, and the establishment of the York Retreat by William Tuke, inaugurate the psychiatric enlightenment. The development of the asylum bears witness to the increasing ability to distinguish between the mad and the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John ...”

“... the bath with baby Jesus; a man in a Windsor carving playing ‘horsey’ with a small child; and William the Marshal, handed over as a hostage by his father at the age of six and then subject to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who hadn’t got the heart even to frighten him. Clearly ...”

“... a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the ...”

“... inspired by the transcendent moment when the main character, Binx, observes someone who might be William Holden on the streets of New Orleans. Is he the real thing, or a ghost, a technological anticipation of holography, or just the manifestation of an awareness that such gods as Holden had become axiomatic, as much a model for American manhood as Johnny ...”

“... they tried to discuss postwar domestic reconstruction, or from the Tories Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, who told him that after the war Britain would find the leadership of Europe there for the taking. Over five years, Churchill’s abilities as a strategist were tested and he sometimes failed, but he was triumphantly successful in creating a narrative, the ...”

“... first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of ...”