“... driving force of her narrative. In her long list of star-spangled acknowledgments (Prince Philip, Lord Carrington ...) she apologises to du Maurier’s children for exposing ‘events in their mother’s life which were unknown to them and which have proved painful for them to discover’. The apology is seemly, but she must have had qualms when explaining ...”

“... Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters it. Completed in 1937, it also has something of the bullying pomposity characteristic of official buildings erected ...”

“... for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a 19th-century source informs us, her husband ‘wished to know whether he would ...”

“... sister is a heartless Goneril. An emotional entanglement leaves her ‘exactly in the condition of Lord Hardy and Lady Charlotte in The Funeral’ (by Steele). Her rift with the theatre manager Fleetwood is glossed over with a quote from Peachum. Even in moments of trauma, her sense of theatre is uppermost. Returning ...”

“... 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 ...”