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“... bay. ‘Live upon sixpence a day – and earn it’ was the cure for gout advocated by the surgeon John Abernethy. The traffic in quack cures for gout in the 18th century well merits the description ‘Aesculapian bedlam’. But gout did not monopolise the scene. In the 1740s the gout wars were heavily overshadowed by the pamphlets of Bishop Berkeley, the ...”

“... was solemn, quiet, respectful, and it greatly helped that no one was allowed to film or record. John McDonnell MP spoke first, saying that his children and grandchildren are his most precious gifts, and that just as he condemned the killing of Israeli ‘innocents’ by Hamas, so his heart went out to everybody in Gaza. Jess Barnard, who sits on Labour’s ...”

“... He wasn’t able to give any further details of the incident. The solicitor for the defendants, John Turner, puts the blame on the investigating team: ‘Evidence that tended to disprove what had happened was pushed to one side, evidence that seemed to fit was gleefully seized on. And every time there was a negative, it was twisted. Normally, if ...”

“... gruel to give it a bit of flavour (dukes were in terrific form at this period). One cartoon showed John Bull presenting a shovel and a basket of bread to a starving Irish family saying: ‘Here are a few things to go on with, and I’ll soon put you in a way to earn your own living.’ (How many wags in prandial conclave did it take to think up that one?) An ...”

“... Heath, destined to be hanged in 1946 for the lurid murders of young women (the wartime careers of John George Haigh, the ‘acid bath murderer’, and John Christie, the serial killer, are also noted). The 50,000 arrests claimed by the Army’s investigative branch were not for failure to salute, or to polish a bucket, but ...”

“... seems an unusually difficult exhibition, when compared, for example, with the grander displays of Turner and Constable at the Tate in the Seventies. A large number of the most famous paintings are missing, whether because they were unavailable for loan, are easily visible elsewhere in London or in the Tate itself, or (as I suspect is often the case) because ...”

“... wants to win the Nobel Prize ... Roth. Roth is just a fuckin’ masturbator, a wanker, man, in the john, whackin’ off. There is a disquisition on Shylock himself. There is a long salt-cod-rabbinical ramble, as told by a Mossad agent, on why Jews must never commit loshon hora – viz. the telling of cruel stories against themselves. Much of the material Roth ...”

“... a grip on the billions of bits that punk sparked off, from cider-swilling crusties to the music of John Zorn. But the result of all that labour would be an impenetrable slab of print, entirely out of kilter with the spirit and point of the exercise. Punk rock has been dealt with in print in three main ways. Early artefacts like Fred and Judy Vermorel’s Sex ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, the works at Ravenscraig employed as many as 13,000 men. Deborah’s father, John, was a miner’s son and left school at 14 to work at Colvilles, the mill that made the girders that hold up Tate Modern. He lost his nerve, Deborah discovered, after rescuing a fellow worker who had been nearly cut in half; so he ran away to Essex, where he ...”

“... them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without suffering too many ‘headers’. As everyone knows, the golden age of cycling arrived in the 1890s, with the invention of the inflatable tyre. This was a golden age, too, for the admen, who readily saw that the way to symbolise pneumatic ...”

“... hosts are suitably variegated: Lord Glenconner (Colin Tennant) in St Lucia; the historian Sir John Plumb (‘peppery but very entertaining’) also in St Lucia; Norman Parkinson, the photographer, in Trinidad. He visits Richard Branson’s house in the Virgin Islands, pronouncing it to be more tasteful than others he could (and does) mention. He finds ...”

“... Marsh Arabs. As well as the interview with Thesiger, there is one with another ‘post-imperial John Buchan character’, David Stirling, who added that new regiment to the Army. The interview is dated 1974, a bad year in Britain, when Stirling launched an organisation to train people to keep sewers and power stations operational in emergency. He had ...”

“... Kiggell papers, but the General rates only one passing mention in the text and Brigadier-General John Charteris, Haig’s overoptimistic chief of intelligence, is absent from the book. Both men were ‘unstuck’ when it was too late to matter. After the war Sir Lancelot Kiggell was sent to govern Guernsey. On the Home Front, we are told, there were only ...”