“... 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 ...”

“... to agree on a political system and, perhaps more crucially, to accept the subordination of one’s home city to a national government, whether republican or monarchical. These matters had never been thrashed out. There were rival views. Charles Albert was marching into Lombardy as much to bury republicanism as to further unification. Pope Pius had been ...”

“... Africa and the St Lawrence Valley. And it prevailed in Delhi in 1876, when the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, laid on a week-long feast for 68,000 officials and maharajas (‘the most colossal and expensive meal in world history’, according to Mike Davis) while 100,000 people died of starvation in Mysore and Madras. Lytton blamed the Great Famine of ...”

“... the only stations that would play the new dance music being made by Black artists, Kiss FM was home to many of the best DJs of the era, including Danny Rampling and the future Radio 1 star Trevor Nelson. But the pirate radio scene was a Wild West of stolen transmitters and police raids, and McNamee wanted legitimacy. With enormous effort, Kiss managed to ...”

“... and tender, indulging them as he himself had been indulged at Fox How, the Arnold family home in the Lakes. From the start, he was exasperating. Even the awful presence of the great Doctor could not make him grind away at his studies, whether at private school, at Winchester, where he spent a year, at Rugby, where he did win some lesser prizes, or at ...”