“... of the ancients – especially the triennial voyages with which Solomon’s fleets had fetched home the gold of Ophir, known in Herwart’s time as Peru. Every mythical conveyance – such as Pegasus, the winged horse of Bellerophon – stood for a real ship. And every mythical object with a point – such as the spears of the Greeks at Troy ...”

“... certainly at the start, and in connection with MI5 in particular. (MI5 is the one that works at home; MI6 is the foreign branch. Neither name is any longer the official one: MI5 is now the Security Service; MI6 the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS.) Not everyone knew about it, or was ‘content’. They certainly did not know when MI5 extended its remit ...”

“... This last is described by its publishers, Houghton Mifflin, as ‘the beautiful cornerstone of any home library’, and, given that the Shakespeare canon is only just short of a million words in length, the inadvertent suggestion that most of these books are hefty enough to be used as building blocks rather than just as reading matter isn’t far wide of the ...”

“... burial. The great violinist had died of cholera in 1840, and his corpse was being taken home to Genoa by his son. But the Genoese declined to let the body ashore for fear of infection, a refusal repeated at Marseille, and then at Cannes, until the son, in desperation, sighted the rugged reef-island of Saint-Ferréol, and stashed his father there in ...”

“... knew how much an ounce of gold cost in the country you were trading with, and how much it cost at home, then you could translate the value of their currency into your own. The emergence of reliable exchange rates facilitated a period of intense global economic integration at the close of the 19th century that was unrivalled until the late 20th century. The ...”

“... so that Britain’s main task was to avoid disrupting it. The Tory approach was opposed by Lord Palmerston, the driver of the Liberal Party’s foreign policy from 1830 to 1865, who could not resist associating British policy with various progressive and national causes that threatened to disrupt or at least annoy the conservative-minded Concert. Paul ...”

“... Britain spent vast sums ‘to torture one man abroad, while tens of thousands are starving at home to furnish the expense’. At first glance, the strain of British admiration for Napoleon seems the principal novelty of Semmel’s book. His broader contention that representations of the man served mainly as mirrors in which the British saw themselves is ...”

“... which pastiched the Gilbert and Sullivan aria ‘I’ve Got a Little List’, sung by the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado:There’s those who make up bogus claimsIn half a dozen names.And councillors who draw the doleTo run left-wing campaigns.They never would be missed,They never would be missed.Lilley and his civil servants thought disability ...”

“... And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (‘the Lord knows I tried’) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of ...”

“... referred to as ‘our own people’, but to represent them more effectively. A journey back to her home town of Grantham is inescapable at this point. The Path to Power conveys the provincial ambit of Thatcher’s early life, with a self-awareness that avoids affectation. She always remained the daughter of Councillor Alfred Roberts, proprietor of a ...”

“... mother, Baladine Klossowska (with whom, though she came from Breslau, he corresponded in French), Lord Kitchener and Walther Rathenau, Alexander Zaharov and Marianne Mitford, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann, the philosopher Georg Simmel and the philosophical essayist Rudolf Kassner, as well as Gide and Valéry (both of whom he translated ...”

“... is Satan who stands behind these movements in our nation, and he seeks to destroy the “Home”, God’s First Institution.’ The writer, Toni Holt, might be taken as a classic case of what Mitchell sees as the hysterical discourse induced by female identification with the norms of patriarchal culture. A tireless opponent of the Equal Rights ...”

“... and protection to get her going; she did it through her own vim and vigour … Does the lord chancellor recall that in the reign of Henry VIII it was made high treason to take an appeal outside this kingdom? … I think one can take back the divergence between our legal system and that of the continent to the Fourth Lateran Council.At times he seems ...”

“... Wright – who had gone to France to seal the deal while Orville worked on making the plane at home – was an unusual man. He had a seriousness of purpose and a self-directed, unphoney Ohio groundedness, and he was extraordinarily calm about loudly and repeatedly being called a liar and a fake. The entirely unfounded refusal to believe in his feats had no ...”

“... in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think: “They hit us at home and now it’s our turn.”’ I heard about Hashim, a fat, ‘painfully shy’ 15-year-old, who liked to sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the 4th Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the ...”