“... Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want … I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma.’In Fathers of Men, Jan Rutter’s pipe-smoking housemaster, Mr Heriot, sets out a similar credo: ‘Our standard is within the reach of most … there are those who would tell you it’s the scorn of the scholastic ...”

“... was four thousand. The other source of employment, already in decline, was the local craft of straw plaiting.Family life operated laterally across networks of aunts and cousins. An evocative passage in Landemare’s memoir describes a six-mile walk from Aston Clinton to Aldbury with her mother and two younger siblings to visit her maternal ...”

“... and Chuter Ede, the current Home Secretary. I was told, even as Pol was being shoehorned into Jack’s boots: you know how it is, our people have to talk to their people; what if our political editor has to shmooze with Jack after he’s choked on the Himmler gibe that same morning? Having naively believed that ...”

“... of mutton and potatoes under it’ on which the company is feasting in The Pickwick Papers while Jack Hopkins tells the story of the child who swallowed a necklace. Dickens couldn’t stop sensing. ‘His imagination overwhelms everything,’ Orwell concluded, ‘like a kind of weed.’ But it isn’t enough to notice him noticing. Dickens did a great deal ...”

“... among the peoples of the Australian desert, always clad in ladylike white gloves, long skirt and straw hat. But she also rebukes Bates’s presumptuousness in asserting that Indigenous Australians were better off under imperial rule, happier to be indentured than free, and were condemned to extinction, so that all that could be done to help them was to make ...”

“... the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ Harris reported, ‘a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target.’ Although bombing didn’t ...”

“... Victorian portraits of the kings adorn the front cover, in the colours of a washed-out Union Jack; Dan Jones provides a blurb. Burt and Partington seem to have understood the brief. On the first page they assert that Magna Carta confirmed English and ‘arguably the Western world’s’ liberties. Arguably. We are told that ‘the parallels between this ...”

“... Lybrand dinner for selected corporate clients at the Lanesborough Hotel. I am placed next to Ed Straw, Jack’s brother, whom I immediately take to. He tells me the family history and assures me that in student days he was far to the left of Jack, whom he regarded as hopelessly ...”

“... Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the anti-aristocratic hero of Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), a martyr who dies with the words: ‘The bondman is avenged, my country free!’ Perhaps surprisingly, Forrest did not play the libertarian Brutus, though this was for aesthetic rather than ideological reasons: by his standards it wasn’t a ...”

“... school, too, and James Milne recalled seeing him standing in the playground with the rim of his straw hat torn. He spent much time alone, and in the country, at Colinton Manse, where his grandfather lived, he used to hide under an old yew tree. One of his cousins described him putting his ear against the wall that divided the garden from the ...”

“... The ‘great ship’ was the British Empire; the words are those of the imperial historian Jack Gallagher. Noel Annan believed that the ‘peaceful divestment of the empire’ was ‘the most successful political achievement of Our Age’. The main actors on the British side all came out of it pretty chuffed, too. They must have been encouraged in this ...”

“... was given an enhanced role in running the company when it restarted after the Second World War. As Jack Ewing says in Faster, Higher, Farther (2017), his eye-opening book about the company, ‘the Nazis had unwittingly laid the groundwork for one of the grandest experiments ever in worker-management co-operation.’This governing structure saw Volkswagen grow ...”

“... with a small, red, crap-caked Toyota truck that, some time ago, had seen better days. There was straw in the back. Funny kind of transportation for a legend. But I knew she was in there, behind the gated wall in front of me, and I needed a little time along with the ocean before the tryst began. The ocean shushed and tittered like an audience when the ...”

“... champagne to ticket-holders? There is a terrible sequentiality in all this as in ‘The house that Jack built’. Events pile up, and every slender straw thrown on the heap is arsonous. The town is tinder, ready to ignite at a touch. Of course this is mainly the work of Pyotr Stepanovich, who has prepared the ground. Yet ...”

“... Lover’ a serious critique of Orientalism before the letter – to grab at any (camel) straw to get Ellington and Louis Armstrong into the ‘diversified’ current curriculum ahead of, say, the estimable and now canonical Langston Hughes.The musical flatulence of ‘Menelik’ might have been accepted by the more enlightened executives at RCA if ...”