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“... be our guide to modern Cambridge than the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History? Christopher Brooke was brought up in Cambridge, the son of the professor of medieval history and himself a post-war Apostle. He begins by whisking us round the colleges telling us what each was like in Victorian times and how the abolition of the religious Tests and the ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... Old Junky. An aroma of Establishment dignity now attaches to him. In the early Sixties, Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, saw fit to deny him a visa to stay in Britain. He was undesirable. The TLS did all in its power to keep Naked Lunch from publication, proscribing it as ‘vomit’. Nevertheless, helped by a determined defence from its British ...”

“... as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as the ‘Rupert Brooke of the Depression’.) Isherwood, he grudgingly conceded, could claim ‘accomplishment’. Isherwood returned the tepid compliment, 12 years later, with a script for the Tony Richardson production of The Loved One. The movie regularly makes the lists of ...”

“... King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have Michael Howard. Though he has grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford ...”

“... that Catholic Irish-Americans have traditionally enjoyed. One Northern Ireland politician, Basil Brooke, had the misfortune to be spurned by an American President who found it opportune to be absent from Washington when Brooke arrived. Terence O’Neill, more persistent, actually managed to have his photograph taken with ...”

“... among them Jefferson, Lecky, Baldwin, Churchill, Guedalla and Plumb (who lumps George with King John as ‘one of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it ...”

“... portraits of women in 18th and 19th-century fiction – Clarissa Harlowe, Emma Bovary, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, Anna Karenina – is their disconcerting resemblance in this one respect to the heroines of the Classics. Ultimately their authors do not know what to do with them: they cannot be assumed to potter on through life in the free relaxed way ...”

“... text, by declining to use inverted commas. In contrast is cited the conversation between Mr Brooke and Dagley in Chapter 39 of Middlemarch. The argument breaks down at the first hurdle, as a matter of fact, because Joyce’s dislike of inverted commas (though interesting in other respects) is trivial for the purposes of MacCabe’s case. This is what ...”

“... as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter ... Samuel Beckett (of course), John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan ...”

“... had been unhorsed, however, the steam seemed to go out of the relationship. Early in the Gulf War, John Major was invited by one of his more neanderthal backbenchers to indulge in a routine spot of BBC-bashing during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons. Major pointedly declined the opportunity and went out of his way to compliment the World Service on ...”

“... or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again ...”

“... athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become an alienated, albeit highly lucrative profession rather than a sport. The game’s most flamboyant and most gifted practitioner, Andre Agassi, has earned fabulous sums as an endorser of various ...”

“... with the elderly gentleman beside me. He had a lot to say about herbaceous borders. He was John Profumo. But I didn’t know it was him until the end: helping him on with his coat, I saw a little nametag. He liked talking to Denis and they seemed to have things in common.We can now say a bit more about that, thanks to the third volume of Charles ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”