“... 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 ...”

“... like well-adjusted British Asians. Not that they regard Britain as paradise, or feel entirely at home. Since the older Mr Joshi brought the family here from Malawi in 1972, half-expecting to find a nation of Lord Mountbattens, their view of Britain has inevitably changed. The Joshi find it irritating that the British media ...”

“... face, it was said, would rubberise itself into the shape of the spirit, who was, at various times, Lord Kitchener, Jack London or Franz Liszt (he came to tell the children to practise their instruments more frequently). But the barmy, scrambled upbringing wasn’t always innocent or even well-intentioned. Although Barnes later said that she loved her ...”

“... José Maria Sert’s Saint Teresa, Ambassadress of Divine Love in Spain, Offers to Our Lord the Spanish Martyrs of 1936 is an altarpiece, painted in earth colours on gold, which employs the Counter-Reformation iconography of intercession and ascent. The heroes – of the Nationalist cause – and the ecclesiastics who cling to the saint both ...”

“... On a winter’s evening in 1803, James Hogg turned up for dinner at the home of Walter Scott. The man his host liked to call ‘the honest grunter’ was shown into the drawing-room, where a pregnant Mrs Scott was resting on a sofa. Unsure of the protocol in these toney surroundings, and deciding to take his cue from the hostess, Hogg flopped onto an adjoining sofa, smirching the chintz with his dung-spattered boots ...”

“... two full terms were to be about. Blair sought to make up for this by leaning on the venerable sage Lord Jenkins for advice. (Rawnsley appears to accept this estimate, repeatedly referring to Jenkins as ‘the great historian’, apparently unaware that serious historians regard Jenkins as a coffee-table lightweight.) What Jenkins had to offer was a passionate ...”

“... and derogatory remarks about Negroes’ and he was stoned by classmates on his way home. During his freshman year at Columbia he was denied a dorm room and excluded from contributing to the college newspaper. And, as he pointed out to his increasingly impatient accusers (‘Could you make it briefer, please?’ Cohn interjects at one point), he ...”

“... rather than back. Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!’ When he went home, he sat down and wrote Maurice, which he sent to Carpenter in August 1914. He was admitted into the inner circle. Forster compared Carpenter’s personality to that of a religious teacher, a guru perched in Sheffield: ‘It depended on contact and couldn’t ...”

“... a mess, complexly rearranged, a yellow matted wrinkle of scar tissue.’ They claim to want a good home for the dog, but this desire is expressed rather sardonically: ‘Where will he inspire the most contentment and where will he find canine fulfilment?’ There is certainly some resentment being projected on the dog (drain cleaner is added to his hamburger ...”

“... The most adventurous collectors of Old Masters in the first half of the 19th century, such as Lord Northwick, and the most discriminating, such as the comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier, also collected contemporary art. The former bought what was believed to be Daniel Maclise’s masterpiece, The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854), as well as Italian ...”

“... of thousands of refugees. Imagine then his and his government’s delight when Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen proposed to restore the outline of the 1939 settlement almost exactly. A quarter of the republic’s territory for 17 per cent of the population! And the right quarter at that: the historic ethnic space of western Herzegovina and Posavina. The arid ...”