“... at which grace, delivered by the senior man present, sometimes lasts a long, long time: ‘O Lord, we want to thank you for this wonderful weather we’ve been having ... temperature up in the nineties and looks like staying that way ... for the good cooking of Shirleen here and Mary Belle ... for bringing into our lives our guest this day, John Rayburn ...”

“... was standing in the cathedral: ‘on the very spot where rather more than five years subsequently Lord Nelson was buried – a spot from which we saw, pompously floating to and fro in the upper spaces of the great aisle running westward from ourselves, many flags captured from France, Spain and Holland ... these solemn trophies of chance and change amongst ...”

“... trustworthy). Throughout all this, he drilled out several million words of highclass copy for his lord and master, Hearst. ‘I never bite the hand that feeds me’ was Runyon’s motto as a journalist, and over the years he made sure that he never had reason to fall out with Hearst, even during the proprietor’s pro-Nazi phase. By the end of the ...”

“... public order over much of what had been the Frankish Empire. The consequence was that the bond of lord and man was almost all that was left by way of social cement. The predatory appetites that this form of society had always generated sought wider outlets as they were increasingly canalised at home, with the difference ...”

“... as double-edged as it was backhanded. ‘I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes,’ he prefaced a long quotation from the passage above; but Keynes had ‘never said a truer thing’. Here is the theme of Richard Cockett’s study, Thinking the Unthinkable, which has seized on a superb subject. Using archival and oral sources to ...”

“... of the 1760s had a field-day with a heroic John Wilkes (‘Wilkes and Liberty’) and with Lord Bute as Public Enemy Number One (no fewer than four hundred anti-Bute satires appeared, mainly sporting a jackboot and a petticoat inscribed ‘no petticoat government’, in reference to Bute’s alleged liaison with the King’s mother). The American ...”

“... remark about the IRA bombers, and for his invitation to Sinn Fein to visit County Hall, if the Home Secretary had not changed the focus of the uproar by ‘excluding’ the two Sinn Fein MPs from the British mainland. He declared that Labour would stay in office and simply refuse to raise transport fares after the law lords’ judgment, and was saved from ...”

“... and financiers’, but even ‘the standard works of reputable men, even men of high degree, like Lord Bryce, who went there to learn, or M. Clemenceau, who went there to lecture, not to mention the lesser fry of honest journalists and bona fide travellers. All alike seem to revel in compiling soporific statistics of marketable products, in recording the ...”

“... an absolute monarch. He was described as a priest-king, a second Melchisedech, or even as ‘Our Lord’. Other rituals, however, introduced the theme of humility: the Pope as servant of the servants of God, walking barefoot in procession or washing the feet of ordinary people on Maundy Thursday. Krautheimer has little to say about ritual itself, but he is ...”

“... to win an election its appeal must be much wider than that. The Party must win support from ‘the home owner as well as the homeless’, he said in a major speech in 1983, ‘the stable family as well as the single parent, the confidently employed as well as the unemployed, the majority as well as the minorities’. But it is all, surely, in vain. A Labour ...”

“... on an alien encampment and, as law-abiding Americans will, blast everything in sight. They go home to their fortress apartments in Coldharbor Tower (the name is one of Theroux’s little in-jokes about his beloved Brixton). But inexorably they are drawn back for their own reasons to the forbidden territory. One has fallen in love with an alien girl whom ...”

“... life or in the heroes of his novels. Powell perceived, for instance, that Waugh was perfectly at home in his father’s house, that the pair were for the most part on affectionate terms and understood each other very well. Equally normal were Waugh’s social ambitions and responses, which again, in a stylised sense, were not unlike those of a minor ...”

“... interests him are itineraries and concatenations. His chapter headings say it all: Brahms Leaves Home; Berlioz and Spohr in London; Brahms and Liszt in Weimar; Wagner and Liszt in Zurich; and so on to the end of the year, with Brahms, Berlioz and Liszt in Leipzig and the Schumanns in Holland and Hanover. I imagine him poring over train timetables, hotel ...”

“... literature, girls, swearing, having it in for people and doing impressions of what Bradford calls Lord David Cecil’s ‘upper-middle-class drawl’. By the standards of the time their jokes had a punk rock aspect – Amis wrote fondly years later of the days when saying ‘fuck’ counted as ‘the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger’ – and many of ...”

“... is rather different, primarily because far more has always been known about it: its status as the home of a high culture is better documented archaeologically and (ever since Champollion) in literary terms, and it has the most ancient recorded pedigree of any Mediterranean country. There is much less to add or correct. But one area remains in which Egypt too ...”