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“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”

“... of the mutiny at Kanpur weighs in at nearly 700 pages; volumes by Christopher Hibbert and Saul David hover around 500.) Seen from certain perspectives, what had happened was a complete collapse of British security, authority and intelligence. The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view ...”

“... may wield clout approaching MacArthur’s before he self-destructed. This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other times, imperious civilians keep generals on a short ...”

“... Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...”

“... novelists who went off to the war in mid-career in their mid-thirties, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both wrote books about what they had seen at first hand, Waugh’s war being more overtly interesting (the Commandos, Crete, parachute training, Yugoslavia) but Powell’s more typical (garrison duties, staff ...”

“... Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal measure. ‘She blames me for forcing her into other men’s arms. (“You made me do it. I’m really a one-man ...”

“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

“... figure of Ranji among notable figures from his own time – W.G. Grace, C.B. Fry, Wilde, Baden-Powell, Lutyens, Paderewski and Chaplin – and suggests continuities with the Indian friends and acquaintances the narrator has to do with in the present (‘the illusions of Empire ... were still with us’). The tragic history of India in the 20th century is ...”

“... with especial pride. After some London dockers and meat-porters had turned out to support Enoch Powell, thus convincing many fastidious snobs that the proles were beyond all help or consideration, we organised a ‘Confront the racists’ mass meeting where the main address was given by Terry Barrett, a Tilbury stevedore with a voice like a foghorn. He ...”

“... Hart’s T.E. Lawrence); and nicely cheeky (of Churchill, ‘The old humbug can write’; Baden Powell, ‘nice old gentleman as he must be, is a ... Happiness-addict’). Within a short time he’d mastered all the tricks of the reviewer’s trade. He damns with faint praise (of Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins he ...”

“... that the young MP for Finchley voted in favour of Leo Abse’s Bill on homosexuality and of David Steel’s Bill on abortion. ‘I now see that we viewed them too narrowly,’ she confesses as she looks back on these measures. The youth culture, with its ‘bizarre clothing’ and drugs, becomes part of a deplorable ‘world of ...”

“... earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that loss of American virility due to ...”

“... to direct civil servants was a v-sign directed at the backs of Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell.) The other omission is more sinister. It has always been part of the objection to Campbell that he briefed and spun against members of his own government, and that he was ruthless both in the way he rationed access and favours to the press (which you ...”

“... blusters and bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is not mainly ...”