“... stylish Princess Michael of Kent’, Terence Conran, Jean Muir and the ‘energetic ... Lady Harlech’. But if Strong’s plan was to be governed by a group that was both more malleable and more protective than Whitehall had been, it went horribly wrong. Conran started off by talking of the collections as ‘the product’ and ‘inquired eagerly ...”

“... clearly what many men saw later, Dante in, inter alia, the Donation of Constantine, Langland in Lady Meed, until too many men saw it and Europe was overturned. Grosseteste would not have approved of Wycliffe, but Wycliffe was right in claiming him as his predecessor. Southern’s ideal reader would perhaps be Grosseteste himself, if it is fair to ...”

“... had written à propos ‘The clouds that are so light’: Oh, you needn’t think of another lady. There would have to be 2 to make a love affair and I am only one. Nobody but you would ever be likely to respond as I wished. I don’t like to think anybody but I could respond to you. If you turned to anybody else I should come to an end immediately. The ...”

“... the copper sheeting carries only its own weight. The copper sheeting is only 3/32 in. thick. The lady is practically transparent. Weight for weight and height for height, she has a skin like Meryl Streep ... Like a dolphin adapting its epidermis to the speed of the passing sea, she ripples and flexes in the wind, redistributing the air pressure so that it ...”

“... White House has retaliated in its familiar two-prong style. Hillary has delivered thoughtful First Lady speeches, ruminating about the ‘irresponsible’ freedoms of Internet communications and the sad lack of ‘gateway-keepers’ – something must be done about all that paedophile porn and political slander. Meanwhile the White House Rottweilers have gone ...”

“... authority by challenging the central tenet of monotheism itself. Pacelli became a devotee of Our Lady of Fátima and the legends of Fátima and Lourdes bulked far larger in my childhood than anything to do with the Bible – and since these legends depended on visions of the Virgin, it was not long before Pacelli announced that he had been having visions ...”

“... want to borrow your flat at times like the early evening, for an hour or two, to entertain a young lady’; ‘I used you as an alibi on Friday afternoon – you know I’d do the same for you any old time, eh?’)? And how was it that Amis became the piss-frothing Dylan Thomas’s literary executor? And what is this limerick about Christopher Ricks that ...”

“... some of them detailing Thackeray’s illicit passion for Mrs Brookfield. His daughter Annie, now Lady Ritchie, did her best to counter this with a series of ‘biographical introductions’ attached to the Centenary Memorial Edition of her father’s work. The paternal prohibition was breached. In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... between individually rational members of the committee of the self. Weak will is when the lady with the blue rinse carries a motion to condemn sin, but the treasurer’s strictures defeat attempts to finance a clean-up campaign. Pears stresses the danger that such functional explanations will be vacuous unless there is a way of explaining why ...”

“... and confiding that he was frightened at the prospect of fame. There is the truly awesome extent of Lady Elgar’s devotion, fervently thanking God whenever Edward wrote beautiful, wonderful, sublime, magnificent music – which in her eyes he invariably did. There is the dreadful deprivation inflicted on their daughter, Carice, constantly and firmly kept both ...”

“... abroad and to persons of quality’. Her dissociation of language looks forward to Mellors, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who talks like a coalminer when he makes love and like an LSE don when discussing coal strikes. All this is to say that Phillipps has written what he obviously intended to write, an introductory essay, designed to stir rather than wrap ...”

“... grandmother when he was ten and she was seven: ‘What does she look like?’ he asks. ‘An old lady, white hair, in her eighties,’ I say. He smiles. ‘Everything changes,’ he says, ‘except the dead.’ Elsewhere a Russian dissident reminds us of Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, who cannot find it in himself to disbelieve his wife, though all ...”

“... she did or did not want to do. She wanted to abolish poverty: but she did not want to play the Lady Bountiful distributing charity, nor was she willing to adopt the harsh distinction that the Charity Organisation Society drew between the deserving and the undeserving poor. She was profoundly convinced that poverty and miserable social conditions were the ...”

“... oeuvre (as much a social phenomenon as social history) and the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (Mrs Dale meets the Archers). Indeed, a glance in any bookshop will reveal row upon row of such rustic and escapist volumes, dwelling with dewy-eyed and treacle-tongued rapture on the idyllic delights of cottages, villages and country ...”