“... conflicting subjects, Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots; while the zealous Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, moving from the novel to a hagiography of Edmund Campion, produced a horrifying portrait of the persecuting queen. Equally, the rise of gender studies has inevitably drawn Elizabeth into the stormy seas of women’s history. A mere historian can ...”

“... because he had been a real original, not a standard-issue stereotype British eccentric like John Betjeman, who had been Richards’s immediate predecessor. But the Shand stories were nothing like as marvellous as the legends about ‘de Cronin’, ‘H.deC.’, ‘Ivor de Wolfe’ (as he nommed himself de plume) or – to the very oldest servants of the ...”

“... smiles which the author cannot have intended. Kingsley Amis used to quote a novel by his friend John Braine (it sounded too good to be true and I never found it in Braine’s oeuvre) in which a woman says to the hero as they lie together, naked in the afternoon: ‘It isn’t bloody fair’ (or words to this effect): ‘not only are you a best-selling ...”

“... his cousin, a former viceroy of India, arranged for him to work for his second cousin, Evelyn Baring, consul-general of Egypt. Grey’s perspective was transcontinental, even though his cultural hinterland was conventional.The Greys were a dynasty, and they were made by empire and war. Because Charles Grey, Edward’s great-great-uncle, led the ...”

“... and also from the other great contiguous empires of the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks. Even so, Evelyn Waugh’s famous observation, cited here by Daniel Moynihan, applies to them all: ‘the foundations of empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment always.’ ‘There was nothing,’ Bremner writes, ‘in Marx’s model of successive social ...”

“... The ‘Billeting Lark’ consisted of variations on the evacuee racket perfected by Basil Seal in Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. Best lark of all was the phantom payroll rip-off, which reached its wildest flowering in Liverpool, where the sons of Belial had a glorious time. A ship repairer in that city salted away a fortune in bank vaults all over the ...”

“... scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women. Turn the page and the odd couple is joined by a third, for here ...”

“... hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the ...”

“... from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ...”

“... and Edgar Allan Poe had their addiction to opium, Pope his lameness, Cowper his depression, John Clare his insanity.’ Family disasters fed the desire for dark afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like Browning’s Evelyn Hope ‘sixteen years old when she died’. Life and ...”

“... Selassie, whom he had already encountered as Ras Tafari. There are sharp words for a fellow guest. Evelyn Waugh, of whom he had not then heard, was ‘blind to the historical significance of the occasion, impercipient of this last manifestation of Abyssinia’s traditional pageantry’. He was also contemptuous of the British minister for not inviting him to ...”

“... gramophone records of Rumanian church music on the table, next to a pile of prayers composed by John Donne (who also preached at St Dunstan’s). This sturdy English church is encircled with chapels for several of the independent Churches which are in communion with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black ...”

“... with the ‘time of old sin’ – whether a fantastical Alma-Tadema-ish Ancient Rome, or a John Addington Symonds Athens, where pederasty was not merely permissible but praiseworthy – drifted, for those who survived their heady youth of Baudelaire and absinthe, into the Aesthetes’ religion, in which chalices and smoke played their part. ...”

“... John Donne​ is a modern rediscovery. His reputation, high among his contemporaries, fell after their time, along with those of other 17th-century metaphysical poets who would wait equally long for rehabilitation. The late 17th century and the 18th, committed to orderliness of metre and feeling, disliked the ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’ rhythms of his verse, his ‘false’ conceits, his unruly sensuality ...”

“... was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for ...”