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“... boys are spoken to as diminutive adults and every adult male is, to use the title of one of the best poems in this collection, an ‘Old Boy’. In this poem again the school language (‘could do better’) is played back from an adult perspective: I could do better in the written answer questions, but everyone looks up to me because I’ve been round the ...”

“... of reasons for believing that there was no choice but to fight an opponent who had declared war. Geoffrey Goodman makes the first case: Margaret Thatcher saw the NUM – Arthur Scargill in particular – as the embodiment of all that she held to be endemic in Britain’s economic decline: monopoly trade-unionism in a state industry subsidised well beyond ...”

“... by Andersen Consulting that though the firm’s tender was higher than others, the best possible candidate to provide the computer system was (wait for it) Andersen Consulting. ‘It is clearly wrong,’ the MPs said, ‘for somebody who is tendering for National Health Service business also to be advising the National Health Service as their ...”

“... own humiliation to tout for votes for her favourite. Bruce Anderson has nevertheless written the best of the three journalists’ books on the Major succession to be published so far. That is not entirely surprising, since his credentials are unusually good. Not only was he an admired (by me, at any rate – his employers foolishly sacked him) right-wing ...”

“... coming to accept that even if it could, the conditions that it usually sets might not be in the best interests of those who provide its funds or of the afflicted countries ...”

“... shift is prompt, my acceptance of the social-discursive transfer will come much more slowly. Geoffrey Hughes’s Words in Time. It is dedicated ‘to all workers at the alveary’, in reference (I take it) to the emblematic title of a work by the Tudor lexicographer John Baret, who set his students to collect materials for a trilingual dictionary and ...”

“... the British Isles, with the corollary that ‘kings of England who spent time in France were at best wasting their time, and at worst hindering the fulfilment of England’s historic task.’ Had the warrior-king Henry V been succeeded by someone with marginally more smeddum than the meek Henry VI, Gillingham reckons that ‘a dual Anglo-French ...”

“... the lecturer visibly does.As a lecturee he’s almost as animated. I once sat behind Ricks while Geoffrey Hartman delivered a lecture which sliced all the fun and feline energy from Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry, and left the fur and paws of the poor creature clinically deconstructed on the lecture room floor. Ricks’s scalp, exposed in noble baldness ...”

“... and so to call Barnes unchallenging will be thought to set him down as inauthentic or at best third-rate. Of course he is neither: Come where thou climbedst, fresh and free, The grass-beglooming apple-tree, That, hardly shaken with my small Boy’s strength, with quiv’ring head, let fall The apples we lik’d most of all.   Or elm I ...”

“... help ‘many slightly muddled, BBC-battered people to see things more clearly’.) The title of Geoffrey Lewis’s biography could have been ‘Quintin Hogg’, ‘Quintin Hailsham’ or just ‘Hailsham’. No one, after all, would dream of writing a biography of, say, Harold Wilson and calling it ‘Lord Wilson’ because deep down we know that was all a ...”

“... as one of the silliest films ever to have come out of Hollywood. Its tenuous grip on history is best exemplified by the claim in its tie-in novel that ‘the victory of Arthur at Badon Hill was so complete and so devastating that the Saxon army retreated for ever from Britain’ – which, if true, would mean that we must all be speaking Welsh to this ...”

“... careers by 1990: that of Thatcher herself after the 20th century’s longest premiership; that of Geoffrey Howe, her lieutenant as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1979-83, during the period of the so-called ‘Thatcher experiment’; and that of Nigel Lawson, who succeeded him at the Treasury from 1983-89, during the period of the so-called ‘economic ...”

“... Spanish Armada, published in 1988 by the underwater archaeologist Colin Martin and the historian Geoffrey Parker. Of the hundred or so books marking the quatercentenary of the fleet’s defeat, theirs stood out for its fusion of archaeology and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit and, as Patrick O’Brian ...”

“... born in the East End of London, was taken on as a messenger boy in Printing House Square when Geoffrey Dawson was at the helm. If, fifty years on, he had succeeded to the editorship, he would have known better than to cast himself as an unofficial member of the Cabinet, which was where Dawson, the villain of this book, went wrong. Dawson intrigued to ...”

“... custard’s which is the skool i am at’ – whose spelling is atrocious. His diaries, written by Geoffrey Willans (a one-time schoolmaster) and illustrated by Ronald Searle, originally appeared in Punch, as a kind of sequel about a boys’ school to Searle’s St Trinians drawings. They were published in book form as Down with Skool! (1953), How to be Topp ...”