“... of early 1960s London. Maverick, ambitious and something of a fantasist, he was a co-owner with Peter Cook of Private Eye and the Establishment Club in Soho. He was also a habitué of John Aspinall’s gambling club, the Clermont, which became the fulcrum of Lucan’s life after he left the bank. When Lucan disappeared the ‘Clermont set’ loomed large in ...”

“... commerce meant that while Ibsen and Shaw were transforming British drama, it was Charley’s Aunt, Peter Pan and The Scarlet Pimpernel that played to packed houses. Yet there was also Boucicault and, at the end of the century, Wilde. The theatres themselves were designed in a style for which McWilliam has coined the apt term Populist Palatial. Almost the only ...”

“... mother, a widow at 18. She responded with india-rubber resilence and cast-iron fortitude. Nellie Hill walked right out of Spencer, Indiana, went to Paris, France, married Maurice Macmillan, and moved into a fine house in London, England. She not only settled in England but settled for it, thoroughly Anglicising both herself and her ambitions for her new ...”

“... picture with a cosier domestic appeal shows the one-time home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Headington Hill Hall, near Oxford, now the ‘council house’ seat of Robert Maxwell, lit up by rockets at night, with a huge illuminated sign saying ‘Happy Birthday Bob’ suspended from a tall tree. Perhaps because the picture does not show the full dimensions of ...”

“... touch with the rural revivalists. Rolf Gardiner at Springhead in Dorset was trying to ‘rebuild a hill-and-vale economy along modern organic lines’, at once reducing local unemployment and staging work camps where the educated could sing and dance after heaving their forkloads of muck. Viscount Lymington, Eliot’s farming friend in Hampshire, the leader of ...”

“... or educational, most grown-ups make only occasional nostalgic excursions into the country of Peter Rabbit, and then only as part of the ritual induction of their children into reading. In contrast, the young have always been efficient rievers of stories from all sources, and have carried off such literary booty as pleased them. Now that children have ...”

“... dropped as too hot to handle by EMI) and repackage them as something as cosily British as Benny Hill. At some point, we may be sure, the Monarch will be called on to honour the entrepreneur who gave us (to his own considerable enrichment) Johnny Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’ (‘She ain’t no human being’). Branson’s sanitising touch has been ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings ...”

“... it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte blanche. The free-for-all continued, with neither local nor Parliamentary government overseeing London’s growth, until the setting up of the London ...”

“... personality of the hero in the manner of other series of mystery novels – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Travis McGee et al. The Francis pattern is more like an obsession: the hero suffers great physical pain and humiliation at the hands of a villain who is often so well liked, powerful and respected that no one but the hero can believe in ...”

“... grief. Not that there’s anything to be done about any of it. Doris died, at home, not long after Peter. She caught an infection, and was left unmedicated as she had wished. We got her a hospital bed and the local palliative care team looked after her. She became increasingly comatose until she stopped breathing one morning and was pronounced dead on 17 ...”

“... London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a ...”

“... rock group Coil, now sadly no more since the deaths of its two founding members, Geoff Rushton and Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity ...”

“... porters much given to drinking and drumming, he set out for the interior. By seizing a single hill on the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia, he and his Thermopylean few were able to close the entire border, and to make many a rich haul as the stupid smugglers came stumbling into the trap. All this was done, however, not for the sake of the ...”

“... of every sketch was people dying.’ Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that ...”