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“... hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the shrubberies. For the English the ideal society needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life ...”

“... on her ankles, knobs of white nerve poke up. You could hear the dressing changes coming down the hall by the screams, she says. We lean in the doorway, then one by one sit down at the kitchen table to listen. I have no soles to my feet, she begins again.PaolaLunch with Paola has the looseness of night, everything loose and running around a bit. She is ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

“... Clodagh Hartley, the Sun’s Whitehall editor, was acquitted over her dealings with Jonathan Hall, an HM Revenue & Customs press officer. Hall, who worked on the law enforcement desk, earned £17,475 over three years for leaking, among other things, the 2010 budget the night before it was delivered to the House of ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... social group, lies over north Norfolk. Eleven miles to the north of Agnew’s house is Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, still owns farmland on the scale of his eponymous Georgian ancestor, the agricultural reformer Coke of Norfolk. Last year the Holkham Farming Company received £183,000 in subsidies; another Holkham enterprise, Holkham ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp ...”

“... you with tremendous force: the overall effect is of discreet power.[watch]The British architect Peter Smithson, for one, admired the elegance of the skyscraper, then the most expensive ever built: ‘Everything else now looks like a jumped-up supermart.’ The Seagram Building has since been so imitated that it’s hard to recognise its ...”

“... decrypts poured in from Bletchley, to be mulled over by a team including the legendary Admiral Hall, whose Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the ...”

“... When Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,’ Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, ‘he was oppressed and tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.’ Having grown up in Naples, Roberto Saviano is similarly tormented and oppressed. Gomorrah is his account of the lawless deeds of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia ...”

“... at the hands of the Courtenays in 1455. And if one Lancastrian knight of the shire, Sir Peter Bessels of Berkshire, took the then highly unusual initiative of sponsoring a new monastic college at Oxford, the heretical religious interests of Sir John Oldcastle led to his being burned while hanging (presumably still alive) in St Giles’s Fields in ...”

“... other main target is the argument, advanced most recently and influentially by Catherine Hall and Leonora Davidoff, that the political, social and economic changes of the last third of the 18th century contributed to a widening separation between male and female spheres, between public and private. I share many of her doubts on this score. Yet this ...”

“... for a long time ineffectual) efforts of one local magistrate, Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall, to secure their conviction. It is an extraordinary story very well told, largely in the words of the original depositions and other papers in the public records and in the extensive Fleming archive. Macfarlane’s principal aim has been to put the present ...”