“... and foul-mouthed behaviour of Townsend especially. Two other runners, however, John Rivett and Edward Fugion, did a thoroughly professional job in following the Irish revolutionary priest James O’Coigley and tracing his associates. In a delightfully libellous caricature by Isaac Cruikshank the runners were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical ...”

“... a couple of lay peers to make up the numbers) had become so notorious that the solicitor-general said publicly that their conduct ‘would disgrace the lowest court of justice in the kingdom’. It was to meet this reproach that the idea of the life peerage was devised – an injection of red blood which, by being finite, would not dilute the ...”

“... essay in appreciation. He also did some delegation in order to complete the work. The life of Edward Young was written by Herbert Croft, who was more diligent than his master in unearthing facts, but whose pastiche of the Johnsonian style painfully illustrates how hard that style is to emulate. Even with these short cuts, and even with the assistance of ...”

“... The musicians​ of my generation, and I myself, owe the most to Debussy,’ Stravinsky said, but he would also say that, much as he admired Jeux, he found some of the music in it ‘trop Lalique’, a remark of a certain cattiness, calculated to put Debussy’s protean and elusive masterpiece back in its box, at a moment (it was 1959) when, perhaps not altogether desirably for the composer of Le Sacre du printemps, Jeux was belatedly becoming the poster piece of the avant-garde, the work everyone at Darmstadt would be talking about ...”

“... he wrote on 28 July 1914. Germany he saw as the ultimate bulwark against Russian barbarism. ‘Sir Edward Grey has betrayed us,’ he wrote on 5 August 1914. On this issue, shattered though he was at the time, he came to change his mind. In Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) he saw the war as having ‘been fought on the principles of Fox and Grey’, and in ...”

“... of unpalatable truths, while being reproached by more decisive, or more outraged, comrades such as Edward Thompson and John Saville, who left to establish an independent journal. But in the spring of 1957 he accepted the inevitable and left the party.It can be hard now to recover what a volcanic existential crisis this was for those, like Hill, whose lives had ...”

“... yet in a position to reassert themselves. The real struggle was still to come. Still, it might be said that the fall of the Bastille, or the Bolshevik seizure of power, were also only starting-points. A useful series of maps, a chronological table and a glossary, help the reader to follow the deciphering of the earlier age, a palimpsest overwritten with ...”

“... to say nothing that the author does not also wish to say of Huxley – or that might not also be said of that Scottish labourer-turned-geologist, Hugh Miller, whose rising through the ranks may have predisposed him towards progressive creation but emphatically not to any theory of evolution. These are, however, minor discomforts in a book which, although not ...”

“... responsible for Moldavia,’ she told America’s TV Guide in 1986. ‘I sat down one day and said: “I’m only going to be on the show a year and I’m going to end it with a shoot-out in Moldavia.”’ Did she know that Moldavia was a real place which would gain its independence just five years after the wedding was filmed? Did she dream up the name ...”

“... when you write,’ his uncle the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft advised him. Sassoon himself wrote to Edward Carpenter (one of his many gurus on a variety of subjects, in this case how to live a free life as a homosexual): ‘I’m one of those people who can only learn things by coming into the closest possible contact with them.’ He was well aware that he ...”

“... of Men’s sight, and of some it is thought they did not so much as confess themselves before they said Mass again.’ Others ‘that had preached against Catholicks, were admitted presently to preach for them’, while ecclesiastical officials ‘that had been Visitors and Commissioners against us, were made Commissioners against the Protestants’, and on ...”

“... what I’d do if they killed him. I was there to give what’s called moral support. I would have said then, and now, that my brother was a nice man through and through, truly decent, and wouldn’t hurt anyone on purpose, unless they weren’t nice or provoked him. But he sure did get himself into some shit. My brother always had unsavoury friends. His ...”

“... on the sofa. It was a text from Jamie Byng, the publisher of Canongate. ‘Are you about?’ it said. ‘I have a somewhat left-field idea. It’s potentially very exciting. But I need to discuss urgently.’ Canongate had bought, for £600,000, a memoir by the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The book had also been bought for a high sum by Sonny Mehta at ...”

“... slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet.’ ‘Ah,’ said the president. ‘Oui.’ The ‘Marseillaise’ and the ...”

“... menfolk might wear simple brogues, but they themselves had shoes of gannets’ skins, and were said to look like “feathered Mercuries”.’ Sometimes brogues rose above the knee, like fisherman’s waders: clearly their rusticity defined them, not their shape. These serviceable homemade brogues could translate a labourer into a nymph, a shepherd into a ...”