“... haute cuisine long before either Steinberger or Gopnik announced that it was in crisis. Fergus Henderson serves good English food (roasted bone marrow, potted beef) at St John beside Smithfield Market and April Bloomfield does well with rollmops and devils on horseback at the Spotted Pig in Greenwich Village. And above ...”

“... had evolved. Now, the Astors frequently invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Nancy and Waldorf also ...”

“... that day at the crimes of England and her associated military reprobates. One who did so was Major John C. Spahr, an executive officer with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, but serving during the spring of 2005 in the Persian Gulf on the USS Carl Vinson. Major Spahr was 6 feet 3 inches tall and did a ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times MP. As Sir William sat as fellow MP for Oxford with Thomas Chaucer, I was naturally on familiar terms with him and startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss. To the north of the north aisle of the short nave ...”

“... record racist or racially dubious songs. Even the reserved and refined Negro bandleader Fletcher Henderson, a college graduate, recorded his own arrangement of ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon’ (1932). Its opening choruses, before the band enters, consist of full-throttle solos by his star sidemen, Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and Rex Stewart on cornet, as ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... process. The Labour Movement itself (with a capital ‘L’ and a capital ‘M’, as Arthur Henderson, a County Durham architect of the modern Labour Party, once put it) is no more than a ghostly presence. The Durham Miners’ Gala, to which Hudson devotes two set-piece descriptions, has shrunk to a shadow of its former self. Horden colliery closed in ...”

“... to identify suspects in need of psychiatric help. The Crown Court study by Michael Zander and Paul Henderson was of value precisely because it gave us the opinions of all the principal participants in all the cases which went through the Crown Court within the period of the study; if, as some people have argued, the right inference to be drawn is more the ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... a first-rate record collection, mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins and Cab Calloway). Unlike his friend Léger, who merely adapted ethnological textbook drawings for his ‘primitive’ stage designs, Brancusi had finally internalised it all, had become an African, if you will, at the age of ...”

“... attend a convention of European socialists, whose delegates included Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson, and which produced nothing. The convention was designed as a continuation of the regular prewar gatherings of the Socialist International, at which various factions had squabbled and bickered before declaring their unshakeable class solidarity and ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... came to our school to have it closed so we could join the demo, and the principal, Brother Henderson, closed it for the day. Because there was no martial law, no military dictatorship then, about 150,000 people marched through the streets of Lahore. Our government supported the British, which provoked a wave of anger against them. ‘Does independence ...”