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“... There was a press conference on the 19th and the public picked up the 1918 connection on the 20th. David Sencer, Director of the Center for Disease Control at Atlanta, Georgia, prepared a memorandum called ‘Swine Influenza: action’. It went via the secretaries of health, education and welfare to President Ford. On 24 March a ‘Blue Riband Panel’ of ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... soldiers, were arrested. Several of the culprits were deported and on 22 April three teenagers – Hugh MacDonald, Hugh McIntosh and Neil Sutherland – were hanged. Hundreds of police and soldiers lined the streets for the execution, in what Knox calls ‘a pageant of civil and military power’. In 1993 the party was ...”

“... That assault on the ‘English ethos’ comes from one of its most vehement and defiant opponents, Hugh MacDiarmid. In the preface to his last published collection, Direadh (1974), he praised Eagleton’s book, but added that he had unfortunately overlooked the one shining exception to his general thesis: MacDiarmid himself. If even Eagleton has been reluctant ...”

“... What have Margaret Thatcher and David Steel in common, apart from holding the leadership of their respective political parties? Both are highly intelligent and educated persons with academic qualifications – Thatcher in chemistry and law, Steel in arts and law. Both have been called to the bar, and for both politics has been the main preoccupation of their adult lives ...”

“... epicentre of back-to-nature authentic foodery, River Cottage HQ, the Dorset farm hang-out of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Initially notorious for eating roadkill and frying up placenta, F-W has established himself as the shaggy-haired, TV-savvy spokesman for organic, locally sourced produce, and the author of much-praised cookery books, the latest of ...”

“... Seven years after his death, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reputation is still a cauldron of discord. He would have enjoyed that. Steaming in the mix are the resentments of those he expertly wounded, the awe of colleagues at the breadth and depth of his learning, dismay at his serial failures to complete a full-length work of history, delight in the Gibbonian wit and elegance of his writing and – still a major ingredient – Schadenfreude over his awful humiliation in the matter of the Hitler diaries ...”

“... Committee of the SDP are all, so to speak, born-again Labour revisionists – old disciples of Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland, who have spent their political lives fighting the fundamentalists on the Labour Left. Painfully, reluctantly and at different speeds, we have all been forced to recognise that that battle cannot be won inside the Labour ...”

“... from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels – whose ...”

“... reported case of human infection with the Zika virus was in 1964. Another Entebbe virologist, David Simpson, had a 36-hour fever, some back pain, a headache and a rash. Three days later he had recovered apart from some spots. For many years the Zika virus was thought to be unimportant. There was no evidence to suggest that it could do anything more than ...”

“... the trade-union movement is not likely to seek the ‘overthrow of a government freely elected’. Hugh Jenkins, who was Labour MP for Putney for fifteen years till the 1979 Election, has recorded interviews with twenty of his Labour constituents (among them Hugh Stephenson, Business Editor of the Times, and Labour’s ...”

“... has always lived a quiet life and shunned literary circles.’ Widely regarded as, in Hugh Walpole’s words (quoted on the same cover), ‘the finest English novelist of his generation’, he avoided the public exposure that usually accompanies such exalted cultural status. He seldom gave interviews to journalists, and was, indeed, seldom to be ...”

“... Tourists seem usually to have been conducted within the endogamous British upper class, although David Hume made himself ridiculous by his unrequited passion for a Piedmontese countess and James Boswell did more than flirt with a Sienese lady foolish enough to fall for him. ‘Whore hunting amang groves o’ myrtles’ may have been as common as Burns ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”

“... Sedgwick, and set to work fathering six children: Martin, Arthur, Nelly, Maggie, Fred and Hugh. Appointed the first headmaster of the newly established Wellington College, he made a reputation as a personality in the Arnoldian mould (his sermons were collected and published under the title Boy Life, Its Trials, Its Strength, Its Fullness) and he shook ...”