“... their targets – for example, an opposition legislator’s generous acknowledgement that although Lord Lieutenant Townshend ‘bullied and blustered he was merry and loved his bottle’. The protagonists have by no means the monopoly of all the wit. Macaulay, since we have mentioned him, would have been glad to have anticipated Dr McDowell in such a line ...”

“... forgiveness of the enemy, as she did in the Fortnightly; she was happier with the implacability of Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1940 Virginia Woolf was asked to supply ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ for an American symposium on current affairs concerning women. She had to fall back on rambling and padded reflections which she hoped might help in years to come ...”

“... breadwinners nor, in any obvious sense, ill. The quacks were raking it in. By 1939 the Ladies’ Home Journal was trilling about the surgical possibilities of ‘widening the eyes, changing them from round to oval, shortening the eyelids, lengthening or shortening the mouth or varying the width of the lips’. The original surgeons, worried by their ...”

“... to Jewish immigration.If Hecht​ and his Revisionist friends were to find the rescued Jews a home in Palestine, it would be against the wishes of the Arab majority and what Hecht called ‘the sly British’, who were desperately trying to maintain order. In February 1944, the Irgun declared that it was at war with the British; a still more militant ...”

“... many of the other characters, including Sinclair himself in a memorable walk-on (‘a flannelled Lord Longford: on sulphate’), are drawn, kicking and screaming, one assumes, from real life. Some of them I recognise. One or two of them I know. That is Sinclair’s autobiographical bit. Think of Downriver as if Alice had wept a river of tears, rather than a ...”

“... loyalty to him and his family: warriors like William Hastings, who went from mere gentleman to lord in a matter of months, and the Welshman Sir William Herbert, who became earl of Pembroke; and administrators like Thomas Montgomery, the medical doctor William Hatteclyffe and Thomas Vaughan, who oversaw Edward’s system of chamber finance, which gave the ...”

“... years after letting fly an explosive fart when bowing respectfully before her, with ‘Ah – my lord. We had quite forgot the fart.’ (He went off again on his travels.) Elizabeth almost certainly was not, as tradition would have it, actually clad in armour like Spenser’s Britomart or Tasso’s Clorinda when she made her famous address to the English ...”

“... the Turks in the Caucasus, and noted the severe loss of morale in the Russian army. He came home in the summer of 1917, through a country in the throes of revolution. July 1917 saw him at the British headquarters at Cairo. Here, the long-planned conquest of the Turkish Empire was in its final stages. Indian troops had already advanced from Basra to ...”

“... in the Italian woods, 14-year-old Baudolino meets a German knight in the fog. He takes him home and feeds him, and discovers the next day that the knight is Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor himself. So his fortune is made. He gets educated. ‘What a great thing to be a man of learning,’ Baudolino exclaims as he ponders the story of how ...”

“... agony, and after eight terrible minutes, Mandrin was mercifully strangled. His career as a crime lord had lasted scarcely a year, but his legend would continue to grow for decades, as ballads, poems, plays and novels about the charismatic smuggler proliferated. The philosophers of the Enlightenment would discuss his case, and some of them would seize on it ...”

“... he produced was a ‘letter to posterity’ – it was buried in the grounds of his Hampshire home – to mark the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth. In this, he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are ...”

“... values and methods developed in the more authoritarian environments of Britain’s colonies coming home to roost. (A high proportion of British secret service personnel had imperial backgrounds.) That such activity was reviled in mainland Britain may, perversely, have aided its development; if it had been more generally accepted it could have been monitored ...”

“... plot to befuddle the minds and enslave the bodies of the Chinese. As for the British back home, they never approved of it. The fact that it was called an ‘opium war’ almost from the beginning saw to that. There were attempts to soften the drug’s image – upper-class aesthetes in England had, after all, been experimenting with it for years, and ...”

“... languages and laws, were not always accorded the respect that their existence reflected on their lord. Rival allegiances were always a problem, and conquest could easily be followed by outright political oppression. Difference from the political elite could very easily be interpreted as inferiority: when habits of dress as well as language or law marked a ...”

“... they freed voters from ‘all sense of shame or responsibility’. ‘Everything secret,’ Lord Acton said, ‘degenerates.’ Public opinion had sanctioned the foundation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 on the understanding that its officers would be uniformed and employed in preventing crime, not in detecting criminals. Detectives, the Times ...”