“... Stamp prices were lowered, post offices were built, mailboxes were attached to lamp posts and home delivery allowed young women to receive letters without visiting a space full of loungers who were up to no good. Systems didn’t always function smoothly, and dead letters piled up, providing journalists with homely material for columns. But the scale of ...”

“... by events he could neither control nor comprehend. And Philip Ziegler’s official life of Lord Mountbatten suggested that the royal family’s ‘beloved Uncle Dickie’ was an interfering manipulator of unscrupulous methods, and a shameless adventurer of colossal and inordinate vanity. With so much daylight now being let in, it is hardly surprising ...”

“... it was also the truth. I met one local commander, Alia Ismet, defending a shattered old people’s home seventy metres from the Serbian front line, who, as well as being a defector from the Yugoslav National Army (YNA), was also an Albanian from Kosovo. There was a Jew among the entrenchment-diggers on Hum Hill, Colonel Jovan Divjak, deputy commander of the ...”

“... which most of our industrial competitors have felt to be necessary for democratic participation. Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister, sneered that the Daily Mail was written for office boys by office boys, but much of what is most characteristic in modern British culture has been produced for ordinary men and women by Oxbridge graduates. Among ...”

“... the book are impressive), and does come up with his own choice phrases (the early works of Lord Berners are ‘small masterpieces of Firbankian tristesse’), but the entire Constant section relies far too heavily on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his ...”

“... would walk to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, drink a glass of sherry, read the newspapers and walk home for luncheon. In the afternoon he would walk back to the club and weigh himself. He died in 1901, leaving the family financially embarrassed. Clara preserved his last letter, the order of service from his funeral, some beech leaves from Ealing Cemetery, his ...”

“... an extent that it has become less easy than of old to read Yeats’s poem, ‘The Scholars’ – Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way? – in the righteously scholar-scorning spirit intended. Villiers was a genuine romantic, so thoroughgoingly the real thing as to look very much like a caricature of it. He was not duplicitous, although ...”

“... has been compared with Pushkin’s own disturbed state at this time. He wrote the poem ‘Oh Lord, don’t let me go out of my mind’ soon after finishing The Bronze Horseman. The last part of the poem, dealing with Yevgeni’s terrified flight, has great hallucinatory power: the nearest English equivalent I know of is Mazeppa’s nightmare ride in ...”

“... but to the satisfactory discharge of living in general. In Conrad’s ‘The Shadow Line’, or Lord Jim, even in Heart of Darkness, everything is intensely satisfactory, the language, the sense of things, the reality, or rather the thereness, of objects and people. The novel did not invent such reality, but has developed its conjuration into a fine ...”

“... the Foreign Office is itself embattled. Hated by the Treasury and caricatured in Whitehall as a home for cocktail-drinking loafers, it was sidelined under Labour and received a significant blow in 2007, when the Treasury abolished the overseas price mechanism, which had protected overseas spending against currency fluctuation. In a bid to rebuild its status ...”

“... it could be something private, hidden in a locket worn next to your heart. In his autobiography, Lord Herbert of Cherbury recounts how his admirer, Lady Ayres, had a full-size portrait of him ‘contracted into little form’, and wore it round her neck ‘so low that she hid it under her breasts’. Trouble ensued when her husband found her lying in ...”

“... natures flow?If there peace after strife be givenShall hearts remember yet and know?Thy vista, Lord, of havens dear,May that in such entrancement bindThat never starts a wandering tearFor wail and willow left behind?That means, roughly: ‘Do dead people remember what it was like to be alive, or is the sight of God so glorious that they don’t look ...”

“... any case denied the Earl permission to return). Harington got the full treatment: she ‘bid “Go Home.” I did not stay to bidden twise; if all the Iryshe rebels had been at my heels, I shoude not have had better speede, for I did now flee from one whom I both lovede and fearede too.’ As if all this weren’t enough to ensure Harington’s ...”

“... book with the timely observation that ‘Warren Hastings was our first Governor-General in India. Lord Mountbatten is to be the last.’ Two other fellows of All Souls, both lawyers, also had reason to be interested in Hastings at the time: Cyril Radcliffe served on the Boundary Commission for India, while the egregiously indolent John Sparrow would shortly ...”

“... ultra-Catholic art, devotional or liturgical images for veneration or meditation in church and home. With the appearance of Luther, the age of the cult image in north-eastern Europe came to an end: art, it seemed, was about to be eliminated by the word of God. The Kingdom of Christ, Luther declared, ‘is a hearing kingdom, not a seeing kingdom: for the ...”