“... ongoing affair with the English heritage. Mr Johnson’s volume on British Cathedrals may be in a well-established tradition, but it has unusual features. His criterion of selection is simply that a building must have been, or become, the seat of a bishop. Thus St Albans and Peterborough, Norman abbeys ‘episcopalised’ respectively in 1877 and ...”

“... on the literary scene. Marvell’s habits of poetic imitation and allusiveness, stressed by Smith, may leave a lay audience wanting a wider understanding of his engagement with Ovid and other masters, and broader light on the relations of his writings to those of such contemporaries as Cowley and Cleveland and Denham. Smith’s is only the second ambitious ...”

“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... month, quite legitimately in each case. Another example, more drastic, from the Conservatives: ‘Richard Benyon is Britain’s wealthiest parliamentarian, worth around £110 million. Despite having … applauded the government for “reforming Labour’s something for nothing welfare culture”, Benyon is paid £120,000 a year through housing ...”

“... he worked for a City bank in order to ‘make my pile’. He wrote to his uncle, with what we may hope was a degree of irony, that he knew money couldn’t buy happiness but that it could buy ‘cars, yachts, expensive holidays’ and security, and these things, he explained, would make him happy. He reckoned that a large part of success in finance – 20 ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... be manipulated ‘as a convenience for the rich and powerful to save themselves from criticism’. Richard Ingrams, then editor of Private Eye, suggested that, since he felt so strongly, Waugh might stand for Parliament himself. It’s possible Ingrams was joking, but Waugh took up the suggestion and ran in Thorpe’s North Devon constituency for the Dog ...”

“... forerunners and precedents constituted the historiographical task. In Masters, Unions and Men Richard Price takes issue with this approach, which he identifies specifically with the work of the doyen of current practitioners, Henry Pelling. ‘Inconsistent even in the explanations that it does adduce to explain the rise of labour, traditional labour ...”

“... You may not like the book, but you will be impressed by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore ...”

“... the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that ...”

“... some reviewer, next month, ‘gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY, (in which I remember the weather was very hot)’, the heated critic should not be exasperated at being treated with ‘good temper’. Like the fly that buzzed around Uncle Toby’s nose all through dinner, he would be allowed to buzz off ...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... murdered, but that is not my view.The trial of these prisoners on murder charges had begun on 21 May 1975, in a fortified courtroom built for the occasion and further protected by a barbed-wire fence, a detachment of mounted police on constant patrol and canted steel-netting installed above the roof, as a defence against a possible rocket attack. Everyone ...”

“... at the Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility ...”

“... around 400 ad by holy men, like bishops, then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had ...”