“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... in the North, campaigned against Britain joining the EEC at the 1975 referendum. His successor, John Ryman, later jailed for (non-political) fraud, also disdained the Common Market. He called Helmut Schmidt a ‘patronising Hun’. Ronnie Campbell was a die-hard Lexiter; his Tory successor, Ian Levy, rode to victory on Brexit. The figures from the 1975 ...”

“... McGreevy wrote, are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted ...”

“... locality; places which survived into the 1960s and were familiar to me, too. The St Margaret’s Hall and the Kinema Ballroom, Dunfermline; the Palais, Cowdenbeath; and the ‘Snake Pit’, Rosyth. That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... supplant the star and become a legend in his own head. As Reagan told the Hollywood writer Gladys Hall in 1942, he did not ‘believe you have to be a standout from your fellow men in order to make your mark in the world. Average will do it.’ A plain speaker from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood, and later by Sacramento and ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... neophytes – just knows the types so well: English insouciance, le chic français. The entrance hall is created from columns of illuminated Vogue covers arranged by colour (a bit gauche, non?) and leads into a film gallery, where clips of models dancing and cavorting, pulling faces and rolling their eyes, transfix the incoming crowd. All the footage is ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... champion, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson’s claim to a place in what Barclay calls ‘the mind games hall of fame’ is always traced back to the moment in 1996 when his goading of Newcastle’s manager Kevin Keegan produced a spectacular outburst from a wild-eyed Keegan live on Sky TV (‘I’d love it if we beat them, love it’ etc). This is generally ...”

“... teaching and writing of history in English education in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. John Burrow, Reba Softer, Doris Goldstein, Donald Winch, Stefan Collini, Dwight Culler, Deborah Wormell and Rosemary Jann among others have written on one or another dimension. As a secondary but related argument, Slee says that scholars have tended to use the ...”

“... cooking. All the good in the world has always been done after a good dinner.’ If the historian John Tosh’s picture of Victorian masculinities is correct, Household Management was first published during a rather brief cultural moment when men were exceptionally satisfied with their absorption into a domesticity controlled by their wives. It seems clear ...”

“... Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for Thornfield Hall, or the excitable governess departing for Bly at the opening of The Turn of the Screw, Mahoney promptly leaves her parents’ house in dreary Milton, Massachusetts, and heads for the sun-dappled Vineyard, revelling in fantasies about the marvellous ...”