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“... rules is seen as old-fashioned nonsense.In 2010 an early list of the quangos to be abolished by David Cameron’s new coalition included the administrative branch of the Supreme Court. Now even more direct threats have been made, with government supporters openly questioning the need for such an adjudicative body and various reviews being conducted into ...”

“... outlandish, as if to proclaim to the world their individuality . . . while the Mehras . . . held to the old and ordinary ways, as if to announce to the world their inbred indifference to it.’ As children, Mehta says, he and his six siblings thought of their father ‘as educated, reasonable and compliant, and of Mamaji as uneducated, capricious and ...”

“... on the main roads into London, they would hire coaches or post-chaises in the hope of being held up. The six men who formed the Bow Street front line were supported by a small clerical staff, whose duties included advertising crimes in the newspapers (to solicit witnesses and alert pawnbrokers) and keeping the record books, which would become invaluable ...”

“... and Beowulf’. Perhaps because of the success of his popular writings, Lewis was not held in universally high regard in Oxford and was twice passed over for a professorship. In 1954 Cambridge created a new chair in Medieval and Renaissance English, and Lewis seems to have been widely regarded as the obvious contender. After a brief episode of ...”

“... dust’. Like le grand Cobb, he loathes Pompidou and all his works – which should not be held to include the Centre Pompidou, since the politician bitterly opposed the Piano-Rogers design, even though it ended up being named after him. (Hazan will therefore only use the building’s alternative title, the Centre Beaubourg – which, in any ...”

“... is never to identify its informant … don’t talk about Lobby meetings BEFORE or AFTER they are held … Do not ‘see’ anything in the Member’s Lobby or any of the private rooms or corridors of the Palace of Westminster … Do not run after a Minister or Private Member … When a member of the Lobby is in conversation with a Minister, MP or ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... and womanhood – whatever those might be – to the job. In the run-up to election day, she held a series of ‘women only’ events. She taunted hostile male crowds with the thought that even if they didn’t vote for her, their wives would. And so they did. Nancy begged Plymouth not to elect her with a ‘nasty, stingy little majority’ because she ...”

“... the ones at Bobby Van’s. The core included Vogel, Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen ...”

“... were so vivid that they coloured the writing of the play with Oxford and Cambridge still held up to my sixth formers as citadels to be taken just as they were to me and my schoolfellows fifty years ago. I knew things had changed, of course, but I assumed that candidates for the scholarship examination spent two or three days at whichever ...”

“... on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan is a close up of its subject inhaling, eyes shut, fingers splayed; its back cover, three shots of him in different stages of smoking – an action-sequence of sorts. How ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... stance to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”

“... engagements with prostitutes patronised by other members of the libertine Hellfire Club. In 1776, David Hume reported that Banks and Sandwich had gone fishing, joined by ‘two or three Ladies of pleasure’. Everybody knew this sort of thing about Banks, and there’s no evidence that he much minded the satires or that they did him any damage. Wealth has its ...”

“... the point of all this sport-watching? What is it for? I even had a title, drawn from a remark David Sexton, the literary editor of the Evening Standard, once made to me. ‘I’m not interested in sport,’ he said, ‘but I often wish I were, given that the mind is always in pain.’ The mind is always in pain … Yes, given that, you can easily see why ...”