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“... in sociology was first inspired, not, as might be expected, by that great systematiser, Talcott Parsons, but by George Homans, a more modest theorist whose own work was firmly rooted in historical enquiry and the insistence on ‘bringing men back in’ to sociology. With unerring instincts and a fellowship to the United States, Runciman sought out the best ...”

“... and alien. Its conservation moment has passed. Desperate to boost congregations, today’s parsons slam coffee bars and lavatories into fine churches or yank pews out of them with abandon. Churches, they say, are not museums. Instead, museums have turned into churches. There is still curiosity about revived Gothic’s early romanticism and beefy middle ...”

“... outset. It remains a mystery to me why White City Blue should have had so many people, from Tony Parsons to Gerald Kaufman via the Whitbread First Novel Award, in raptures. Rumours of a Hurricane, Lott’s second novel, is a more ambitious, more serious work: the anatomy of a marriage, a dissection of the 1980s. The prologue is set in the winter of 1991. We ...”

“... defeat of the first magnitude) will be the dwindling of international support. Sir Anthony Parsons could assemble a majority at the UN to condemn aggression: but there is no majority at the UN or anywhere else for a British-inspired holocaust. The Hispanic world is shocked. The Indians are representative of the Third World in being appalled. The ...”

“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”

“... sat watching him. ‘Harding was a rather disturbed individual’, the BBC presenter Nicholas Parsons told me. ‘Nowadays a man with troubles of that sort would be in therapy.’ Child abuse is now a national obsession, but in 1963 it scarcely came up as a subject of public concern. That doesn’t mean it was fine back then and we were all better ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... In politics, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle explain for the benefit of their less worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation and deviousness ...”

“... McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ecstatically how ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... sitting on a park bench, wearing a flat cap and a raincoat buttoned up to the neck, listening to Peter Cook. I was drawn in, however, almost against my will. Cathcart points out that we are less interested in the weather than we are supposed to be. While British people do talk about the weather, he says, that does not mean they care about it. I think it goes ...”

“... last few years. First in Patricia Hearst’s 1996 thriller, Murder at San Simeon; more recently in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow. In the style of a docudrama, the film depicts a weekend pleasure cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst’s 208-foot yacht, the Oneida, in November 1924. Hearst’s guests included Chaplin, Ince (whose birthday it was) and ...”

“... and simplicity.’ In 1949, Gear’s work was exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock’s at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. In other words, Gear was part of a large international movement.Berger remained suspicious of this whole trend, which he felt was symptomatic of what he considered ‘a period of cultural disintegration’. In this context, it is ...”

“... repudiated. The last major thinker to attempt a systematic theory of social evolution was Talcott Parsons, in his final years. It is significant that Runciman, amidst a vast bibliography, never mentions him. Moreover, the discredit into which evolutionism has fallen has attached principally to variants of Marxism which assert no more than some directionality ...”

“... she admired Britten, who set some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in Valentine Ackland’s antique shop. He ...”