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“... on their plates. I needn’t have asked, but I did anyway: some of them told me they were ‘doing Atkins’ and others that they were ‘doing South Beach’. Dietary virtue, it was apparent, lay incongruously between the buns. Even asking the question elicited a torrent of second-hand expert commentary – on glycemic indices, net carbs, insulin-resistance ...”

“... on the label, rather than the issue of size’). He flies to New York to interview Robert Atkins a few weeks before Atkins dies of a heart attack. He visits a McCain chip factory and stands on a platform poised over a vat of bubbling fat to watch a chip taster at work, his ‘small bright eyes darting ...”

“... water on the side of a narrow-boat during a family holiday with another Tory MP, the somewhat wet Robert Atkins. During that trip he asked Mr Atkins point blank whether there was any realistic possibility of him becoming prime minister. Anderson records that the two men decided there and then that there was, but that ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian ...”

“... Each element got its overall allowance, paid its staff, obtained its equipment and supplies, and co-operated, sometimes well, sometimes not, with the other elements, according to an overarching plan. The aim was fairness, an even spread of care across the country. In a monopoly healthcare system, competition had no place; on the contrary, it seemed sensible ...”

“... 1952. His abdicated brother returns for his funeral and is met by his mother, Queen Mary (Eileen Atkins), who announces very greyly that he mustn’t mention ‘that woman’s name’. David, or the Duke of Windsor as the lapsed Edward VIII is now to be called, is a benumbed and bitchy mummy’s boy (played here by Alex Jennings, a seasoned royal ...”

“... experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation (1712), which for Guest illustrates the route to divine ...”

“... In the shopping precinct that now clings to the skirts of the old Reading Room, a table is laid with portable derivatives of the Rosetta Stone. The number of them hints at a BM merchandising frenzy: for sale, and I may have miscounted, are a mug, a mouse-mat, a ceramic tile, a tie, a teacloth, a scarf, a T-shirt and two sizes of replica, all of them stamped with a presumably random excerpt from the Stone’s inscriptions ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... for his own profit, because the Lad was so profane to carry it on a Sunday, by ‘Alderman Atkins, Shit-breeches’. The Jacobite attack on the Whigs in A Catalogue of Books, of the newest Fashion, To be sold by Auction at the Whig’s Coffee-House at the Sign of the Jackanapes in Prating Alley (1693), articulates satire through imaginary titles such ...”

“... minutes to Olympic glory, a corkscrew clock tower (with broken clock), a steam engine called ‘Robert’ (home to dozens of incontinent pigeons). Beggars, junk-dealers and God-ranters have been expelled from more salubrious districts. Across the road is a labyrinthine mall-tunnel of Poundland bargains, sachets of Calf’s Pizzle at £1.99 a hit. And an ...”