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“... of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth ...”

“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

“... accept that the heroic dramas are, in their exposition of love and honour, farcical, pure Cecil B. DeMille (though Aureng-Zebe, too, or The Conquest of Granada, it would be good to see just once, for the fun of it). This speciousness or fine hollowness always touches the rest of the plays. Their steady assurance and their real intelligence can prove ...”

“... place a special atmosphere of frivolity, a capriciousness which extended even to its origin myth. Cecil B. DeMille, one of filmmaking’s Founding Fathers, recounted the saga of his California arrival to Charlton Heston, who is shoehorned into this Old Timers’ circle to tell the tale. DeMille, like so many East Coast film pioneers, went West in search of ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... called Ibis. Branch Energy, too, is still in Angola. Buckingham’s men have little resemblance to Cecil Rhodes’s corporate army or to the scabrous soldiers of fortune who have wheeled in and out of Africa for the last four decades. EO is a more sophisticated force. It contracts with governments but patrols the operations of an adventurous mining concern in ...”

“... and in a pair of letters written a few weeks later to the influential and ever vigilant Sir Robert Cecil. This document, we remember, is not only an indictment of Cholmeley, but also of Marlowe, who is named as his atheist guru. There is a suffocating closeness about it all. Drury knows Baines and Cholmeley; Baines and Cholmeley know Marlowe. There is a ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”