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“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... in Britain. When Pilkington Glass went public a Scottish architect of no great distinction, Michael Spens, became a millionaire. He bought Studio International, which as the Studio had been publishing since 1893. It had more institutional subscribers – i.e. annually renewed subscriptions by libraries both here and abroad – than the whole print run ...”

“... Iraq. Annan, denying any knowledge of the contracts, hired Clinton’s defence counsel in the Jones-Lewinsky affair to ward off charges of corruption. The Volcker Commission, set up by Annan to investigate profiteering from the Oil for Food programme, was obliged to look into the matter. Despite the incontestable fact that Annan had met with Cotecna ...”

“... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...”

“... found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same litanies of complaint, distress and need that fill Vivienne and Tom’s letters to ...”

“... was late to take an interest. There are no druids in Shakespeare, not even in Cymbeline. Michael Drayton repeatedly mentions them, but uses both the ‘horrid sacrificer’ and ‘wise philosopher’ images impartially. Milton seems to have first welcomed them as sagacious fellow poets, but then either caught up with Tacitus or had his anti-papal ...”

“... care of children; most interestingly where the gate is pushed open by wealthy and powerful people (Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, for instance, suing a magazine for publishing unauthorised photographs of their wedding), and through it in their wake come vulnerable people like Venables and Thompson. I used to argue ...”

“... of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... even the photography was practised and programmed. ‘They would loan us a Hasselblad,’ said Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 mission, who stayed behind in the moon’s orbit in Columbia, the command module, while his companions descended to its surface. Mia Fineman, curator of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New ...”

“... and evaluating international markets.Even when their projects failed – Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write that a McKinsey-led reorganisation of the NHS in 1974 was a ‘proliferation of paper’ and a bureaucratic mess – they were hired again and again by the British government to reduce employee numbers and institute unpopular ...”

“... is American schoolkids downloading the Starr report and Penthouse’s free photo-set of ‘Paula Jones – Nude!’ for their civics classes. The press were no exception: they, too, got the computer revolution all wrong. Over the last three years leading British and American newspapers (Times, Telegraph, LA Times) have invested heavily in ‘electronic ...”

“... continued decline in our belief in William of Stratford’. Nicholas Shrimpton, D.A.N. Jones and others are cited in such a way as to make them suggest that, when not translating the 46th Psalm, Shakespeare was copying Paley’s papers. Burgess and his reviewers may resent their conscription into the anti-Stratford camp, but the company is ...”

“... Gonzaga – was chaste. This very important poem was discussed with great subtlety by Roger Jones in a scholarly article in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes for 1981 – an article which Lightbown uses and then dismisses. According to Lightbown, it is important to interpret ‘the individual figures and symbols of a picture like the ...”

“... Diana’s social authority depended on political powerlessness. As Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, argued of George V (and the argument holds for Diana), once the monarch becomes divorced from the discharge of political power, once government ‘decomposes’ into two persons, one ‘untouchable, irremovable and sacrosanct’ (the king), and the other ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”