“... loyalty from Boris Johnson. So he turned his attention to Dacre’s boss, the Mail’s owner Lord Rothermere, who also got invited round for a drink. Could he not see that however frustrating it was to be in the EU, it would be worse to be out? Rothermere’s response was: ‘No, my view is much stronger than that.’ But instead of the expected diatribe ...”

“... that Vanessa ever wrote reveals more about their relationship.’ The whole experience brought home to Virginia a difficult truth. She wrote to Philip Morrell: One cant, even at my age, believe that other people want affection or admiration; yet one knows that there’s nothing in the whole world so important. Why is it? Why are we all so tongue tied and ...”

“... rather than as corroborations or illustrations of an argument. The two pages given up to Lord Carrington’s reminiscences of his wartime experiences as a Guards officer (an ex-Foreign Secretary who in his interview apparently had not a word to say about Williams) can only be explained by the fact that Inglis has rather a thing about the ...”

“... Around dusk, groups of demonstrators would take the fight to the police while others left for home. These outings have ritual echoes from a long past of French contestation, but the gilets jaunes who converge on the big towns on Saturdays are thoroughly 21st-century citizens, left out in the cold by globalisation. The success of their protest depends on ...”

“... antithesis is strongly present in Hayek’s Road to Serfdom – the title page of which quoted Lord Acton saying that ‘few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.’) The greatest hardship experienced by a person trying to apprehend Berlin’s presentation of ‘two concepts’ of liberty is in remembering which is ...”

“... came from landowners with political influence as well as crofters with none. In 1919 the factor to Lord Leverhulme, who was on the verge of buying Harris, wrote that for seven weeks from January to March no cargo at all had been landed from Glasgow, with the result that for the last ten days of that time there had been no food in the local shops: ‘the people ...”

“... I don’t say good reasons’). He looked back with particular nostalgia to his time as the Lord Northcliffe Professor at University College London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So why did he then move to Cambridge? ‘Vanity, I expect; ignorance. Terrible mistake, obviously.’ He was an accomplished moaner, or mock-moaner, and his time as ...”

“... and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.’ It was Churchill who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had formed the Royal Naval Division, secured Brooke a place in it and sent it east, in the hope of helping Russia by taking Constantinople and opening up the Black Sea. In the weeks after Brooke’s death landings were finally made on the ...”

“... of its maritime heroes, including Prince Henry the Navigator, the poem about whom ends: ‘Lord, we still must win Portugal.’ The next poem claims that ‘The limitless sea is Portuguese.’ But, despite its patriotic tone, Pessoa’s book did not win the prize. Since his yearning for fame was more fragile than his yearning for obscurity, he took a ...”

“... school and a Sure Start centre, before a visit to a struggling steel business. On the journey home, he gets embroiled in an email exchange with one of his advisers on the never-ending challenge of trying to nail down the peace in Northern Ireland. He also feels he has to respond to an email from Joanna Lumley, badgering him about rights of residence for ...”

“... Yeats in the great elegy of 1939, newly arrived in America and already determined not to return home, Auden was self-consciously composing a poem that announced a turning point in his career. Announcing a turning point is itself quite a Yeatsian thing to do, of course: Yeats was always writing poems saying that he was now finally done with the gaudy days of ...”

“... passage, was also in the past: it had faltered when Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father as Lord Protector, lost his nerve in April 1659. As Sharon Achinstein shrewdly notes in the Companion, the description of Samson’s locks is prefigured in a passage in Areopagitica, where Milton imagines ‘a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong ...”

“... household when his mother went foraging round the house for four-leaf clovers, murmuring: ‘The Lord will provide.’ This superstitious ritual had one purpose only: to get old Dr Thomas’s patients to pay their bills. He was not then ‘old’ – I call him so only to distinguish père from fils. Lewis Thomas’s closest friend as a fourth-year medical ...”

“... title of his work. Swaraj was ‘self-rule’. Politically speaking, it was in effect a call for Home Rule on Irish lines, though this was not an analogy to which he was ever tempted to appeal, since the national movement in Ireland was identified with two strategies – parliamentary and insurrectionary – both of which he rejected for India. But for ...”

“... was first raised with China by the most far-sighted of Hong Kong’s governors, Sir Murray (now Lord) Maclehose, during the first visit ever by a governor to Beijing in March 1979. The tall, dignified Scot had seen a vision of the Hong Kong that was to be; under his aegis, the first harbour tunnel and subway line were begun, and the new airport, still ...”