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“... spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within it. The lecture by Conrad Russell, the dominant historian of the politics of the period, found no place for such sentiments. To him the substance of early modern Parliamentary activity lies in the grind and details of the legislative process, not in the declamatory gestures of the ...”

“... wartime Hollywood heroines. In her mind, I imagine, she is of their number: Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Maria DiBattista. A professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton, and published by Yale, she is heaped with Ivy League credentials but laudably determined not to be stifled ...”

“... might have been problematic. If the Oxbridgey Trads had a philosophical pin-up it was Bertrand Russell, with Freddie Ayer for real deep kicks; Mods backed the darker horse of existentialism. How much the Mod crush on continental philosophy was a pose, and how much serious engagement, is a moot point. Even as ‘mere’ pose it’s a very interesting ...”

“... nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who used initials for their forenames – H.E. Bates, W.H. Davies, L.P. Hartley. Yet early reviews compared Coppard to Hardy, Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, and he was acclaimed by (among others) Ford Madox Ford, Malcolm Cowley and, later, Doris Lessing. Though his most productive decade was the 1920s, and he was well enough ...”

“... speaking on the Reform Bill, enthused over ‘that immense city which lies to the north of Great Russell Street and Oxford Street, a city superior in size and in population to the capitals of many mighty kingdoms; and probably superior in opulence, intelligence and general respectability to any city in the world’. This was pitching it a bit strong, though ...”

“... a party of dark suits and hardhats who were weighing up the commercial possibilities. Bill Parry-Davies, local solicitor, jazzman, fisherman, activist and keen swimmer, was labouring to restore the Haggerston pool to life. He put together a consortium. He contacted the richest people he knew, the ones with collections they might need space to exhibit, and ...”

“... The entire Vienna State Opera decamped to London at the Third’s behest in 1947. Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and ...”

“... to be remembered. In his Civil Wars of Great Britain and Ireland (1661), the Welsh writer John Davies supplied a roll of dishonour in the hope that the names ‘of such rebellious regicides … may be continually odious in all generations’.Navigating the messy aftermath of the civil wars from the perspectives of Whalley, Goffe and Nayler allows Harris to ...”

“... recent wave of ‘revisionism’. The revisionist historians of the Stuart period, led by Conrad Russell with Kevin Sharpe in support, have sought to persuade us that, contrary to what most English historians have led us to believe, the first two Stuart kings were on the whole a good thing, the Parliamentarians a bad thing. Perhaps even more important than ...”

“... of men’s trousers and a battered hat with a brim that hid her face’; the visiting Bertrand Russell; Christopher Isherwood; and Huxley’s favourite mystic, Krishnamurti, accompanied by a retinue of Theosophists and vegetarian catering ladies in saris. While his guests looked like pixies ‘on a spree’, according to Loos, Huxley himself resembled a ...”

“... Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or community might actually speak through the poet, or co-produce the poetry, may be a primitive one ...”

“... at his insistence – as the Master. Interviewing him for the Sunday Times in 1969, Hunter Davies wondered if he had really met Coward or just a facsimile. ‘Is there anything under the cool, charming mask?’ A better prepared journalist would have looked at Coward’s work and found the answer:Miss Hodge: There’s a gentleman to see you. He says ...”

“... when one’s baby-sitter is a cabinet minister one realises one is really old! 21 May 1997. Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of ...”

“... or twenty strong, by contract’ (an early example of the package holiday), which includes a Mr Davies, who, tracing ancient Roman inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, says ‘with intense thoughtfulness: “Here’s a B you see, and there’s a R, and this is the way we goes on in.”’ This is the sort of humour in which Punch ...”

“... an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the ...”