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“... Anthony Sampson begins and ends his book with an account of his grandfather’s funeral, held, as requested in his will, at the top of a Welsh mountain, Foel Goch. Among the mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University ...”

“... as we shall see, bankers often have only a remote prospect of seeing their money back.’ writes Anthony Sampson. He then chronicles one or two of the more spectacular banking defaults of the past, starting with a brief account of how England in the 14th century, then a ‘wild developing country’, welshed on its debts to Italian bankers. He proceeds ...”

“... a small upper-middle-class élite, separately educated from the rest of the population, to which Anthony Sampson continually draws our attention in his fourth attempt at dissecting this country, The Changing Anatomy of Britain. Given the richness of what is on offer in our state schools, why do parents choose to spend large sums of money, sometimes at ...”

“... superhero has been correspondingly fierce. All of which makes the biographer’s job difficult: Sampson continually tells us that ‘Mandela is no saint’ but he never describes any unsaintly behaviour. In any case the glaze of admiration around Mandela is so thick that it can take any amount of knocks. For example, ...”

“... rather than manufacturing – is a topical issue in Britain, and a problem which preoccupies Anthony Sampson. The Midas Touch, flitting from east to west and north to south, touches on this and other important issues, noting the manufacturing prowess of Japan, the new cult of activity rather than leisure for the rich, the consumer obsession with ...”

“... I should declare an interest. Anthony Sampson in The Changing Anatomy of Britain quotes Lord Denning dismissing attacks on a class-based judiciary: ‘The youngsters believe that we come from a narrow background – it’s all nonsense – they get it from that man Griffith.’ Lord Reid was a distinguished top judge ...”

“... the South African technocrats. The reason they cannot easily snap it is best illustrated by Anthony Sampson’s story of capitalist wheeling and dealing with the Apartheid regime. Historically, the system developed as an integral part of the Western global economy. And that is what it is today. ...”

“... Parade and trod the gilded pavements of the City, he must often have glimpsed the footprints of Anthony Sampson, who blazed this trail nearly thirty years ago for his Anatomy of Britain and subsequently retraced his steps more than once. Measured by the Sampson standard, which is a severe one, Paxman’s ...”

“... no place in the South African model; industrialisation had cut them off from their rural origins. Anthony Sampson, who spent a creative four-year stint as editor of Drum in the early Fifties, described as a ‘genuine and massive misunderstanding’ the Afrikaner belief ‘that the blacks, like the Afrikaners, wanted to return to their tribal roots and ...”

“... Macmillan’s rival, Rab Butler, chose a biographer from outside his own party, but his and Anthony Howard’s political outlooks may have been closer to each other than Mr Horne’s and Macmillan’s ‘not very good’ Toryisms. After an undistinguished three years at Eton, a first in Mods at Oxford, a flirtation with Rome together with Ronnie Knox, a ...”

“... Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy dedicates his book. Their increasingly grumpy pronouncements on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’ pepper the pages of Having It So Good. Of the new milk ...”

“... was taken on as a junior assistant (darkroom duties and layout), the magazine’s great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some ...”

“... This year​  marks the sixtieth anniversary of Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, which gave a pioneering analysis of the ‘anonymous institutions’ that seemed to be running the country, and the relations between them. It was the most famous of several books published in the early 1960s exploring the idea of a British ‘Establishment’, as part of a discussion about failure in economic and social life ...”

“... Davie was first offered a job over lunch with Astor at Boodle's club when he was still at Oxford. Anthony Sampson came from Drum magazine in South Africa. Philip Toynbee arrived after his father, the historian Arnold Toynbee, called to wonder if Astor could rescue his son from drink, depression and riotous behaviour. Colin Legum, expelled from his native ...”

“... by the time that happened the Turks were once more on the scene, partially summoned there by Sir Anthony Eden. Eden has been much blamed for ‘artificially setting up Turkey as an interested party’, in the words of Makarios. In a legal sense, this is true. But with Turkey an ally in Nato there would have been something artificial in Britain’s behaving ...”