“... 4600 prisoners of war from Judah, deported to the rivers of Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, to go home after fifty years in detention. A ‘king’ of Babylon called Belshazzar, the story goes, made a feast for a thousand of his nobles and served it on the gold and silver vessels plundered by ‘his father Nebuchadnezzar’ from the Temple in ...”

“... see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets were better over ...”

“... think in the autumn of 1956 when I was 12, I was eavesdropping on an after-dinner conversation at home. My sister, assorted cousins and I had been asked nicely to occupy ourselves elsewhere. Obediently, we moved to an adjoining room, but then listened, giggling, to a particularly raucous, wooden-headed aunt and a bony uncle berating my parents in loud ...”

“... When you’ve sung Purcell’s unfinished fragment from the early 1680s, ‘Hear my Prayer, O Lord’, a two-and-a-half minute howl in C minor, relentlessly unfurling its dissonance and grinding chromaticism, you’ve heard everything that’s important in music, and can skip straight to the 20th century. Or so it seemed to me. My sister was studying the ...”

“... dilapidated. Onegin roots through the cupboards. He finds nothing but an accounts book, some home-made fruit liqueurs, jugs of cider and an ancient calendar. A terrifying chasm yawns between the countryside and Petersburg, the city of new ideas, literature, books, journals and frenetic scribblers: Onegin notices there isn’t a spot of ink anywhere. In ...”

“... 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 ...”