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“... be served alone as a supper dish for tired children’. And parents get spoiled too: George Mott’s Spinach and Bacon Salad is finished off by adding hot honey. But, for the grown-ups, the final verdict must be harsher. We seem to deserve each other, or at least to deserve to be reminded of hard truths, and Quentin Crisp is on hand to provide ...”

“... up marrying a man with a beard,” they scoffed, rolling their eyes at me. Just like her dad, like George Harrison. My Sweet Lord.’ The girls cling on desperately to bits of culture, fashion, pop, but they have the sense that it’s all passing them by, like life itself. Humiliation and conventionality and passivity and banality are inculcated into ...”

“... Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen Brothers movie because it doesn’t look as if it was directed by anybody? Still, they can’t be after a single perfect film, since their best work falls into such distinct modes: quirky ...”

“... movie put together magically out of real images of the time. The documentary footage – Governor George Romney declaring a state of emergency, for example – highlights the historical moment, but seems unreal compared with the rest of what we are seeing. The film at this point is fast and rich and lucid, and still setting a scene rather than tracing the ...”

“... the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France. His subject is the history of the greatest of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation until the 1914 War. In his conclusion, however, he ...”

“... Guard deodorant. A small shampoo bottle. A map of London. A birth certificate with the name Ramon George Sneyd. Two bars of soap. Sixty British pounds in five-pound notes. Hair pomade. A paperback novel titled The Ninth Directive. Shaving cream. Another paperback novel, quite worn, titled Tangier Assignment. A toothbrush. A book titled Psycho-Cybernetics. An ...”

“... As he looks forward to his 70th birthday Sir Michael Howard can also look back over a distinguished career which began with Wellington, Christ Church and the Coldstream Guards. In 1943, as Lieutenant Howard, fresh from the University, he led his platoon in a dangerous uphill charge against a German position north of Salerno ...”

“... Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and ...”

“... from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a ...”

“... has a history involving dozens of paintings, stretching back to the early 18th century, when George Vertue identified the so-called Chandos portrait as an image of Shakespeare painted by a friend and fellow actor, John Taylor. Donated to the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, the Chandos is the only candidate to have been granted much credence, but new ...”

“... ever remembers the feed-line, only the response. Geraldine Ferraro is remembered for rounding on George Bush Sr in 1984 for patronising her, as is her 1988 successor Lloyd Bentsen – with an equally questionable excuse – for accusing Dan Quayle of comparing himself to President Kennedy. In the last of the three 2008 presidential debates it was the ...”

“... Here are two more spy books from authors who worked long ago for British Intelligence. George Blake was very left-wing, and is now slightly less so. Anthony Cavendish has always been very right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him. Why, he asked me once, was there thought to be so much difference between Creasey and Shakespeare? Wasn’t Macbeth a crime ...”

“... competition.With imperial responsibilities came a new hauteur towards Indigenous peoples. Sir George Simpson, the HBC’s governor in North America, turned against the custom of factors taking ‘country’ wives, dismissing them as ‘bits of copper’. In 1846, the settlement of the American border at the 49th parallel forced the HBC to retreat ...”