“... No bond was more important to him, or longer-lasting, than the friendship he forged with William Morris at Oxford. Morris, too, had flirted with the Church – much wealthier than his friend, he once contemplated using his inheritance to finance a monastery – but by the time they left university ‘we were both settling in our minds,’ as ...”

“... the idea that I might not, ‘we’re going to have 600,000 immigrants a year from now on.’ Ken Powell was sitting with us, listening. He was mayor of Tewkesbury at the time of the floods, though not the only one. The town has two mayors: one representing the borough of Tewkesbury, which covers a number of other communities, has a multi-million pound budget ...”

“... itself on a boat or raft. While the air thickens with flying misquotations from Major John Wesley Powell’s pioneer navigation of the Canyon in 1869, the less committed among us may reflect that these approved ways of seeing the place are extremely time-consuming, and require the setting aside of three or more days of one’s time, and the advance booking of ...”

“... depicting Hollywood’s own wild party. The paradigm of all movies about Hollywood is probably William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall ...”

“... not by the peasants who felt her fist in their faces. There are protests by Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell and Adolf Hitler. There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England. The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in ...”

“... Conservative Party in the 1830s were the heirs of the Whigs and Tories who had come together under William Pitt the Younger and his successors to govern Britain almost continuously in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, until the Reform Act made changes of ministries commonplace. They defined their creed in terms of the king’s government: they ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... houses by John Vanbrugh.) The major council estate in Blackheath is Vanbrugh Park, by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, the architects of Golden Lane, the Barbican and the University of Leeds. It is a step back from the pyrotechnics of these schemes, with only one tall tower – a sculptural, symmetrical block separated into two parts, with enormous studio-style ...”

“... and Civil Wars in England in the 1640s; the more general ‘philosophic’ histories of Hume, William Robertson and Gibbon, each wary of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘superstition’; Macaulay on the ‘glorious revolution’ in Britain in 1688; and, in vastly different idioms, Carlyle, Michelet and Taine on what they variously regarded as the glorious or ...”

“... until the appointed hour for his interview with an old queen in Deal, or with the executed traitor William Joyce’s daughter, by his second wife, in Gillingham. Carry On grotesques, professional alcoholics, poets suffering with their nerves, Broadstairs fascists, economic migrants of every stamp: all the devils are here. From the areal to Ariel, Seabrook ...”

“... reviews ‘while they were poring over the latest score from Lords or the Oval’. Later, when William Walton went to see Diaghilev about the possibility of a commission, Lambert went along too and played through his own ballet Adam and Eve, which Diaghilev liked but insisted on retitling Romeo and Juliet, on the grounds that one could hardly ‘expect ...”

“... battles won ‘in bygone days of yore’. Behind Paisley’s head as he spoke was a painting of William of Orange on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. One of the key achievements of the Good Friday Agreement was increased alignment between the North and the Republic. In order to avoid the return of a hard border, EU regulatory checks are ...”

“... has something in common here with The Little Girls, or The Death of the Heart, as well as with William Trevor’s The Old Boys. Naturally enough, all three distinguished novelists contrive to keep the subject clear of the standard treatment given it by afternoon plays on the BBC (‘Stephanie has come back in middle age to the town where fate once dealt ...”