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“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen ...”

“... dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the crisis, the book might look like a hastily-written manifesto for the alliance of born-again social democrats and ancient political re-treads among whom he may be doomed to ...”

“... He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony Benn’. Today he is more often referred to simply as Benn – a hard word spat out like ‘Lenin’. Benn puzzles and alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English ...”

“... of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes. Up speaks real Oxbridge voice, while duly patronising to Auty – not ...”

“... still didn’t meet the needs of many sick and disabled people. In the late 1960s, the sociologist Peter Townsend showed that disability and chronic illness were two of the factors most likely to lead to poverty in the UK. The Nelson family, interviewed by Townsend’s team in 1968, was typical. Mr Nelson, 35, had ...”

“... air’. The various ‘horrid problems’ of Princess Margaret, her love affair with the divorced Peter Townsend, and her perceived reluctance to undertake royal duties, could be similarly teased away. From a sweltering hot Uganda the queen mother wrote to her younger daughter that every dignitary ‘looked gravely at my flushed & streaming face, & my ...”

“... was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic sanitary standards afforded to older people. He reserved special contempt for the former workhouses, where inmates wore institutional clothing (sometimes bearing the ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official ...”

“... work resonated with sympathetic policymakers. He and his associates, such as Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, had particularly intimate connections with the Wilson governments of the 1960s, but their reach was not confined to Britain. They were consulted by more than one broadly progressive foreign government. Much of the social policy of Mauritius ...”

“... Sylvia Townsend Warner died in 1978, aged 84. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926, and none of her later works quite matched its success. In her later years she was probably better known to most people as a name that appeared under rather than above story after story in the New Yorker; that journal published about fifty over a period of some forty years ...”

“... High Street’s strongest and most interesting frontage. The architect, Charles Harrison Townsend, designed similar heavily moulded round-arched entrances for the Bishopsgate Institute and the Horniman Museum. The spaces inside were much less emphatic – almost industrial in their plainness. Discreetly elegant improvements in 1988 and the new ...”

“... who have chosen to make no provision for more than the state will in due course provide. To Peter Townsend, the best-known of the researchers who rediscovered poverty in the 1960s, it was axiomatic that poverty should be defined in relative terms: to be poor is to be significantly less well-off than the average, and as Adam Smith himself had ...”

“... that felons could no longer be shipped to America, more and more of them had to be hanged. John Townsend, taken on as a runner at this time, later looked back nostalgically to this time, when ‘we never had an execution wherein we did not grace that unfortunate gibbet with ten, twelve, thirteen, sixteen and twenty’ criminals, ‘and forty I once ...”

“... Gilbert White, sea fishing, the Elephant Man, Edwardian Sheringham, Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, embroidery technique, Edward Meyerstein, Walt Disney, the Norfolk Giant, the pituitary gland, diabetes, MI5, and Einstein, who stayed at a (not very) ‘secret location’ on Roughton Heath, near Cromer, for some weeks in 1933. In each case, the ...”

“... to it are the slightly spooky depths of rural England evoked by novelists like T.F. Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and David ...”