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“... fashion. Pierre is a bristlingly harsh challenge to the readers of such books, and the posthumous Billy Budd takes its place with other less literary protests against virtual matriarchy – for instance, muscular Christianity, macho college sports, Social Darwinism and Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick. Douglas is a feminist, but in an unusually moderate and ...”

“... not enjoy the same rights as Europeans. None of these achievements (nor the fact that his son, Billy, went on to become the first black British publisher) is mentioned by Gerzina. Also omitted are aspects of Sancho’s life which might make him less sympathetic to some modern readers – his fervent Royalism, his Toryism, his casual anti-semitism, his ...”

“... is quite unsurprising. As a young master at Eton, he had been much under the influence of that Billy Johnson who, discovered as writing with injudicious warmth to a pupil during the holidays, had abruptly changed his name to William Johnson Cory and fled in shame and consternation into the depths of the New Forest, there ...”

“... wouldn’t have made any difference. Unless you were listening to Cliff Richard or attending Billy Graham’s hallelujah meetings, the Sixties (not the decade, but that period from 1965 to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live through interesting times’): we thank our lucky stars ...”

“... filled in the means-tested application form. We would have to make a case every term and have our name written down in ink at the end of the typed list, as if our parents were completely absent from all decisions and all procedures. You felt guilty at both ends of the argument: guilty for not having the form and guilty for resenting your parents for not ...”

“... and 119 kg, and could run a hundred metres in 11 seconds. Lomu died in 2015; when I searched his name online, some of the top results were: ‘He was IMPOSSIBLE to stop’; ‘Jonah Lomu Smashing People for 4 Minutes’; ‘Like a Train Smash’. Other national federations took the hint, and players got bigger, faster and stronger. By 2019 South Africa’s ...”

“... pen with her flat, stubby thumb with no fingerprint, yet haltingly, she still managed to write her name’. Her thumb is ‘as flat as a spatula’. When a guest stares at it, astonished, the landlord explains: ‘Ah you know, the thumbs of the women working with esparto grass are like that … it comes with the job, their fingers are deformed by all the grass ...”

“... surname, English chalk running through it like lettering in Brighton rock), ex-musician, ex-name photographer, current burnout, lucks onto a great scoop: a supposedly dead Murdoch substitute being pleasured by a lively Duchess of York clone. Nobody wants to know. Canary Wharf yawns in his face. It’s the end of the road for Denny, seaside exile in West ...”

“... the pieces seemed to fit perfectly. But modern scholars are no longer convinced: for example, the name Robert Hood and its variants was not uncommon in the Wakefield area through the 13th and 14th centuries, but the only Yorkshireman of this name ever known to have been outlawed was ‘Robert Hod, fugitive’, who forfeited ...”

“... of ‘ten or thirteen’ (a little late in the game by my lights) and knows the lyrics to every Billy Joel song by heart (a detail rarely omitted, for some reason, when he is profiled in the press). After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which as her top wonk he took personally, Sullivan and colleagues started a think tank called National Security Action, which ...”

“... Whitstable and Hastings into locations for second homes and fashion shoots, even the status of the name Jack.’ He went on: The current taste for English things, it is hard not to notice, has happened at the same time as the rise of Euroscepticism, and the emergence to national prominence of Ukip and the British National Party. The new sellers of Englishness ...”

“... of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and his cohorts seized the town for fifteen months in the name of free love, anti-feminism and publicly funded music (D’Annunzio later described him as a ‘beloved comrade in arms’). By 1920 Teruzzi was back in Milan, one of more than a million veterans adrift in a nation that had little use for them, living with ...”

“... in Otto Preminger’s Laura, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, the recorded confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity). There’s also a nod to Camus’s self-confessing narrator in The Fall. In the context of the French crime novel, however, it appeared wildly original. Instead of sub-Maigret detectives propping up an unchanging social ...”

“... magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against Soviet totalitarianism. One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre operation to ‘counter Communism’ by trying ‘to break down ... doctrinaire thought ...”

“... examiner and sat on committees. I had become the person I once impersonated. There were still Billy Liar moments: doodling in meetings, dreaming up titles for novels, imagining the present as prelude. But the masquerade was over. What I did was who I was.Then, two years ago, things took a turn. A viable application for a big research grant fell at the ...”