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“... also phoning it in. Witness the completely pointless recent remake with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot. John Malkovich is about to impersonate the great detective in a Christmas adaptation of The ABC Murders – now that one I’m looking forward to.) A novel in which the detective did it. A novel in which the entire structure of the story was suggested by a title ...”

“... value even to more obscure items such as the Irish writer Thomas Amory’s picaresque Life of John Buncle and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murder, a popular collection of tales of murder and revenge by the 17th-century Exeter merchant whom Coleridge called ‘honest Murthereo-Maniacal ...”

“... work for – publishing and journalism – into auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the ...”

“... degradation.’ The interviews recorded in their book contain a telling comment by Harold Evans on the arrogance of middle-class Labour Party leaders in assuming that their traditional franchise is not interested in the environment: They have a vision of the working class as proles just waiting to be liberated. You see a similar attitude in the new ...”

“... Farrant, and later by Oxford’s Boys, an amalgam of children’s companies put together by John Lyly, who was then secretary to the Earl of Oxford. Two elegant Lyly comedies, Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, were premiered there in 1584, but in that same year legal wrangles over the lease led to the closure of the theatre. If Shakespeare and his company ...”

“... of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time. Right up until the 1930s and Forties, characters in the ...”

“... who gets such a clue into the title of a book, as does Agatha Christie in Why didn’t they ask Evans? And it is Agatha Christie, too, who regularly contrives that just as the clue is dropped a distracting incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage conjurer: a point well made by Robert Barnard in his concise and extremely acute ...”

“... and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”

“... notion to the contrary ought finally to have been dispelled by the cavalier treatment of Harold Evans, whose editorship of the Times was terminated after less than a year. He was removed by Murdoch with hardly a cheep from the independent directors. So much for their value as watchdogs of the public interest. Harold ...”

“... of those who were chipping away at contemporary assumptions of what a woman could be: Marian Evans, Emily Davies, Elizabeth Blackwell, Gertrude Jekyll, Mary Howitt, Sara Hennell, Octavia Hill, Elizabeth Garrett, Millicent Garrett, Bessie Parkes, Anna Mary Howitt, Adelaide Procter, Max Hays, Emily Faithfull, Lizzie Siddal, Helen Taylor, Anna ...”

“... given to the humdrum realities, the second and third tiers of office where men like Worthington-Evans and Griffith-Boscawen manned the engine-room. The argument is rather that the new wartime power bloc had a built-in logic which distinguished it from other combinations. It was a new force in the making, only to be blasted by the peace. To us, it may be ...”

“... the Misses Gethins, Mrs Harris, Mrs Lane, Mrs Farral, Mrs Hale, Mrs Pike, Mrs Southcourt, Mrs Evans, Mrs Hughes and Mrs Trimnel.’ Or the route she takes as the place expands while she explores it? I counted the streets on the way to the library in Neath Road, the main road. After Mansel, and parallel with it, were four: Vernon, Grandison, Caroline and ...”

“... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some reason ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... these discussions. Worse still was the habit which had grown up under the former editor, Harry Evans, of delegating power and responsibility within the newspaper. The plainest example of that was the Insight investigative team, which worked largely under its own editorial control. A common expression in journalism in the Seventies was ...”