“... are relatively discreet – not surprisingly, as this could have got Maisky into real trouble at home – while the 1960s memoirs make bolder claims. Of his quick decision after the German attack on the Soviet Union to do everything in his power to push the Allies to open a Second Front in Europe, Maisky wrote in his memoirs: ‘I did not think I had the ...”

“... fame grew, much of the mid-Victorian establishment came to hear him, including the prime ministers Lord John Russell and Gladstone. Tyndall was never tempted to take up a professional post outside London, partly because he was unfamiliar with university teaching and research – some academic physicists like James Clerk Maxwell disparaged his lack of higher ...”

“... from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down’ – the Museum of the Home in East London, for instance, which until 2019 was named the Geffrye Museum, after one of many assiduous British slavers who made large fortunes and amassed great collections from the trade of an estimated 3.1 million Africans. Arguing against the return of ...”

“... Woman’s Breasts & Bum”’. The following day, Salmond gave a press conference near his home town, Linlithgow, describing the investigation as ‘flawed and bereft of natural justice’. Last year, Woman B told me she spent that weekend trawling social media. ‘Not a word of a lie, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep or drink anything,’ she ...”

“... It was a test I sometimes failed. Sohail was 17 years older than the country he sometimes called home and sometimes hell. Usually when he rang, he would recite a few lines from the Sufi poets with gaiety in his voice, and occasionally he even laughed at my attempts at Punjabi double entendres. But this time his tone was sombre. ‘I’m going back.’ I was ...”

“... 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 ...”