“... the rare phenomenon of an obituary literature written from the grave. British studies in this field are particularly well developed, thanks to the numerous published volumes of British Communist biography and autobiography, to exceptionally comprehensive research and to the interest of established works of reference, such as the DNB and the invaluable ...”

“... a slice of Victoria sponge and we have a cup of tea in the parish room, with the door open onto a field of sheep and in the distance the hill behind Feizor.I collect the paper from the village shop where, seeing a headline about yesterday’s lightning strikes in London, a woman says: ‘I love it when they have it nasty down south.’This is the real ...”

“... to [a] better world is both important and invaluable,’ he said, ‘especially in the field, as the prime minister just reminded us, of human relationships, Europe’s contribution is no less so. It is fitting, I think, that those young men and women on whom the brunt of the task will fall in a very few years from now, should voice their opinions ...”

“... detested the idea of a standing army was always ready to flock to any parades, reviews, field days or mock battles that were going; only the sourest radicals enjoyed seeing the country’s greatest soldier being blown from his horse. And crowds flocked to Astley’s Amphitheatre, where spirited reconstructions of the battle of Waterloo were ...”

“... for the convenience of making marginal notes’. Some leave distracting, even disgusting residues. Andrew Lang wrote in 1905 about reading Ann Radcliffe: The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works . . . belongs to a public library. It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of ...”

“... lawyers’ talk about striking the balance between competing interests is largely misplaced in a field (environmental law is only one example) in which success for either side inexorably involves damaging knock-on effects – for instance, the effect on the urban poor of planning decisions which protect beauty spots from pollution by concentrating it in ...”

“... in the postwar years. By far the greatest military figure wartime Britain produced was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor of Taranto and Cape Matapan, whose remit it was, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean theatre, to protect the British army in North Africa. Yet there is no mention of Montgomery in Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... art of extracting the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine; and she has recently laboured in this field not without success or (as we used to say) not without a blessing. It is strange: ‘we fell out my wife and I’ the other night: she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into ...”

“... it with salt and water and cooked the mixture on hot stone slabs. Bread!At​ some point, in a field of emmer in the Levant, a new kind of wheat started to grow: the ancestor of modern bread wheat. Given its subsequent history, the most surprising thing about bread wheat is that the original hybrid wasn’t engineered by humans but arose spontaneously. An ...”

“... tokens of scholarship, and it would be churlish to complain. But with each new venture into the field Elvis undergoes modification and change. While his supporters, smarting at unsavoury rumours, maintain he stayed smart to the end, the rest speculate about unsocial behaviour and a diet which consisted primarily of pretzels and pills. So business booms, and ...”

“... was already noted for its dramatic spectacles, and the RI was a relatively junior player in the field. It had been founded on the claim that its professors would use rational knowledge to improve agriculture and industry. In practice, however, this proved exceedingly difficult, and the Friday Evening Discourses were themselves a kind of public experiment in ...”

“... by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would embark on the joke. When he’d finished he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll give you back your day’ and ring off. The last joke he told me, only a week or two before his death, concerned a ...”

“... York … was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to Wyeth himself, offering to curate ...”

“... most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast and saw his ...”