“... 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 ...”

“... occasion enclosing ‘a modest gift to keep you warm’, and on another ‘dried dates from our home country’. He also sent her ‘everything I have on my computer so that you may contribute to the public statements that we are preparing to release on the occasion of the tenth anniversary … of the blessed attacks on New York and Washington.’ Bin Laden ...”

“... free of all that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say that this was ground that the Lord still held. What he looked out upon was the sign of a broken covenant. The place was forsaken and his own.In his introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and ...”

“... at the time and he didn’t gain admission to the Club for a decade. After that, he was often back home in Auchinleck or working (more or less) in Edinburgh, while Johnson’s Turk’s Head appearances decreased as the Club expanded and became, he complained, ‘a mere miscellaneous collection of conspicuous men, without any determinate character’. Johnson ...”

“... during his career, dedicating far more energy to opposing imperialism abroad than economics at home. In any case, recent noises from the City suggest that even the banks are now far better disposed towards a Corbyn government (which would at the very least ensure a customs union with Europe) than a no deal Johnson administration. There is a more ...”

“... inequality and social stratification. The market economy, it could be said, renders the citizen lord of the marketplace in his role as consumer, but its browbeaten serf in his role as worker. And since these different roles can hardly be kept in quarantine from one another, the scope even for lordship of the marketplace will shrink: an individual will be ...”

“... backward’, his son asserted, and was generally characterised by a mulish refusal to stir from home. ‘He was . . . timid and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship with others.’ It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a ...”

“... he was everyone’s pal. After he’d gone to his happy hunting ground, the people of his home-town, Dampier, clubbed together to raise a statue to his memory. He now has two memorials. The episodes strung together here are the kind that circulate by word of mouth in isolated communities. One well-meaning sheila (‘woman’) attempts to burn some ...”

“... and stay in the soil for years as a threat to farm animals. If Koch could do all these things with home-made apparatus, there is surely nothing to prevent a contemporary terrorist, with the results of more than a hundred years of research on anthrax at his disposal, from setting up a spore factory and scaling up the procedure. According to the book of ...”

“... Benson, the future archbishop of Canterbury, another married the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh. Eleanor’s brother was the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Sidgwick knew a great deal about the inner workings of English politics as the various Irish and imperial crises unfolded throughout the last third of the 19th century; the unease ...”

“... enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for John Edward Dorington, lord of the manor, and his son: you are robing the working class of the Parish and their offsprings for ever in fact you are not Gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as there are several on ...”

“... it should be urged that there are many black legends about Churchill, put about originally by Lord Haw-Haw and his friends during the war. One of the few certainties we still cling to is that the Nazis were defeated: but you never know, and in this context Gilbert’s defensiveness is comprehensible. In any case, it is important to stand back from the ...”