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“... favourite son was undone by a different sort of woman. Jacobs was one of the mothers. She rose to prominence as the Village defended itself against Moses-style schemes. The Housing Act of 1949 had made it possible for a city to use eminent domain as an instrument of private development. This made ‘urban renewal’ a bonanza for crony ...”

“... rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis ...”

“... a well-to-do woman with a position in the world. The hot road spun away behind her; towns rose from the green landscape, crowded close about her with their inn-signs and petrol-pumps, their shops and police and perambulators, then reeled back and were forgotten. June was dying among the roses, the hedges were darkening to a duller green; the blatancy ...”

“... emperor and empress live.A day in the life of Akihito and Michiko began at 6.30 a.m., when they rose, watched the television news, then walked around one of the gardens in the Imperial Palace. The old palace buildings were destroyed by the American bombs, and the current buildings date from the late 1960s: smart and dignified, like their occupants, but far ...”

“... life. Tolkien was not a man who admired much that had been written after Chaucer, but he did like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). The Hobbit, and the hobbit, fit easily into that gentle, don’t-forget-your-galoshes world.The hobbit was Bilbo Baggins, a member of a small, sturdy, rather conventional species of humanoid, with furry feet, a ...”

“... loosened the screws. The first attempt to introduce market competition into the NHS was made by Kenneth Clarke in 1990, in the dying months of Thatcher’s rule. The ‘internal market’ was rushed in, ignoring the views of the medical profession. It didn’t work. Tony Blair’s first health minister, Frank Dobson, read its funeral rites when Labour came ...”

“... solid and happy, and, at the age of 84, he became a father again, this time to a daughter, Naomi Rose (everyone called her Rosie), on whom he unabashedly doted after a lifetime of dodging and weaving with his sons. Shortly thereafter, in 2000, at the age of 85, he brought out Ravelstein, its protagonist modelled on Bellow’s friend and colleague Allan ...”

“... It became clear that Britain had joined at too high a rate in 1990. When German interest rates rose in the aftermath of reunification the consequences were ruinous for Major’s strategy, with the Bank of England unable to defend sterling, despite putting interest rates up by two points in a single day. The German rate rise was a consequence of the ...”

“... sort of busy bee.I’m not suggesting you were some foppish, would-be West End theatre figure like Kenneth Tynan. When you started ‘Tomorrow’, though, you must already have had a group of collaborators and contributors you could nobble for the next issue.I’d enjoyed bringing out the Scorpion and had always remembered it. Then I met a Sri Lankan, Susil ...”

“... that finally detonated the old system. In a ten-month period in 1974, the price of a barrel of oil rose 228 per cent. The OPEC revolution turned the oil-procurement system upside down. America was now obliged to fashion a new oil strategy from the ruins of the cartel, one in which the Saudi ‘special relationship’ loomed even larger, and had also to learn ...”

“... for tens of thousands of people.’Other female obsessives work in austere isolation. The late Rose E.B. Coombs MBE, former Special Collections Officer at the Imperial War Museum, is the author of Before Endeavours Fade: A Guide to the Battlefields of the First World War (1976 and 1994). Miss Coombs’s bleak volume, illustrated with her own amateur ...”

“... the British legal system. At least that is one point of view. Another – shared by the police, by Kenneth Clarke and by Sir Hugh Annesley, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland – is that it is outmoded and favours the guilty, and should be scrapped because it is routinely exploited by clever criminals and terrorists. (Annesley has even suggested that ...”