‘There probably are quite a lot of people — more than might be supposed — who, like myself, feel that another newspaper photograph of a member of the royal family will be more than they can bear.”

This is a good week in which to be reminded of Malcolm Muggeridge’s views on the Windsors, delivered in 1955 in a New Statesman article about fawning coverage of the Princess Margaret/Peter Townsend affair (or, by then, non-affair).

His article The Royal Soap Opera (yes, even then!) is one of 90 of the best pieces from The Staggers reprinted in a handsome publication marking the magazine’s centenary. What a stellar line-up of writers are paraded for our delectation! Predominantly, of course, from the political left, they include many of the giants of the 20th century.

George Bernard Shaw is in characteristically mischievous mood in a 1913 piece on Irish nationalism; by contrast, J.B. Priestley is atypically serious in the 1957 article that inspired CND. Christabel Pankhurst, again in 1913, writes on (what else?) women’s suffrage; H.G. Wells meets Stalin; Bertrand Russell provokes responses from both Eisenhower and Krushchev writing on the Cold War; D.H. Lawrence percipiently predicts the rise of Nazism — in 1928! — and C.P. Snow identifies The Two Cultures in 1956.

Bloomsbury is present with Virginia Woolf on Lewis Carroll and husband Leonard’s sober obituary on Hitler, The Little Man. Amazing!