“... 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 ...”

“... with the Bonham-Carter family and his consequent assimilation into the ‘Liberal way of life’, Lord Longford’s to his membership of the Roman Catholic Church, Michael Stewart’s to the influence of the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office’s to ‘departmental empire-building’ and the Conservative Party’s to its ‘age-long desire’ to reimpose ...”

“... his transitory income in beer’. Since by their own account both can explain the first, for ‘a lord who did not make a good show of himself and his following risked oblivion, and oblivion would surely end in his estates being given to a more pressing claimant on the king’s good will,’ and since the hideously offensive characterisation of the second ...”

“... of money. Randolph, a chronic gambler, was stationed in Cairo as a press officer, and his letters home relayed news of mounting debts. Pamela was only twenty, the marriage was a calamity and she was stuck in London with their baby, Winston. She turned for help to Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who advanced money and set up ...”

“... the original economic considerations which brought Britain to colonise Uganda in the 19th century. Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s Conservative Prime Minister, put it like this: Administration of the country is not the sole or the main object that should interest us. It is our business in all these new countries to make smooth the paths for British ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... second book of the Novum Organum . . . A plain man finds his stomach out of order. He never heard Lord Bacon’s name. But he proceeds in the strictest conformity with the rules laid down in the second book . . . ‘I ate minced pies on Monday and Wednesday, and I was kept awake by indigestion all night.’ This is the comparentia ad intellectum instantiarum ...”

“... and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he addressed star-struck letters as a foot-soldier in the ‘patriot’ opposition to Walpole. Hill’s connections provided Brewster with an alibi ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... initially shared across Europe and the world. Two days after the storming of the Bastille, even Lord Dorset, the British ambassador in Paris, couldn’t conceal his enthusiasm: ‘The greatest Revolution that we know anything of has been effected with, comparatively speaking – if the magnitude of the event is considered – the loss of very few ...”

“... on Exile’: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new ...”

“... hope these purple passages don’t embarrass you.’ A couple of years later he writes: Near home I stopped and watched half a dozen Jersey cows. How lovely they are! like Siamese cats, almost: the patches of white round the eyes and the soft way the coffee-colour melts into the white underbody. They were licking each other affectionately in pairs, on ...”