“... 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 ...”

“... is at first sight a strange way to describe a man who so resolutely avoided the discomforts of his home country. But the subtitle signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist ...”

“... man whose whole life has been spent in a bracing atmosphere of noble thought cannot feel at home in the exhausted receiver that is called “society”’? But to Newby (as to the satirical novelist) that particular receiver is pretty well inexhaustible; he shows himself excitedly à la page with the intrigues of various society women, as well as ...”

“... her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La Précose’ already had an eye on her future. If she returned home she would soon be back in the corps: she was the wrong shape and size for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St Petersburg. Offered eight months’ work in America and a fee of £13,000 a month, she broke with the Mariinsky ...”

“... of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding over the possibility of leaving his wife for decades, and there seems no obvious reason to look beyond the letter he wrote to her a few days before he died, explaining why he had to get away and wouldn’t be coming back: Your ...”

“... some theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment philistinism. For him, it was going home. Paul Johnson in his tribute to Fuller in the Sunday Telegraph wrote: ‘He insisted that art criticism had become the prisoner not only of an undistinguished clique but of a base and repellent vernacular. He aimed to restore it to English ...”