“... driven out of English prose: ‘As he wrote and rewrote his sentences, a pencil drawing of Grant which he had found at a bookseller’s in Colchester, looked down ...’ And, from the essay on Beerbohm: ‘If he had a secret it lay in his quite terrific will and the power to live as if he and the people he saw, were farcicial objects.’ He is equally ...”

“... idea of the modern epoch as the end of civilisation persisted until the Eighties in the work of James Joyce’s former amanuensis, Samuel Beckett. It is implicit indeed in the title of his play, Endgame. The work – today unfashionable – which seemed to authenticate this vision was Spengler’s Decline of the West. Our generation of writers was, very ...”

“... told him not to chase after office in an era defined by simple men of crude force like General Grant and, later, Teddy Roosevelt. The money power was rampant; no one valued ‘trained statesmen’. One theme of the Education is that the juggernaut of government, and its temptations and pressures, ruin all who seize power: ‘the distortion of sight – the ...”

“... Bangladesh’s government, which took office in 1972, was sufficiently grateful to Stonehouse to grant him citizenship. But the bank was problematic. There were regulatory obstacles, and a shortage of cash deposits from British Bengalis. The police started investigating possible fraud, and the pressure on Stonehouse built up. Even though he wasn’t ...”

“... president of the Union and was hailed ‘the Balliol Demosthenes’. All Souls’ refusal to grant him a fellowship – did the examiners shy at that statuette of the Blessed Virgin on his desk? – left him with a grievance for life. In 1896 he married the American Elodie Hogan in California, after some earlier heavy foot-slogging on that continent. The ...”

“... Briar, Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less prominently later in the novel, and one of the difficulties of being a teenager, too often ...”

“... Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain standing in a cattle pond a little way to the north. When I arrived at Essex ten years ago ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”

“... planting the flag in Landsmark’s body. The man who appears to restrain Landsmark in the photo, James Kelly, an anti-busing leader and later a city councilman, was actually trying to prevent the assault. The photos Forman took next show that Kelly interposed himself between Rakes and Landsmark, calming the crowd. Forman’s photograph alone is an inadequate ...”

“... lawfully do in the exercise of the royal prerogative – declare war, make peace, sign treaties, grant honours, govern colonies – and what requires the authority either of the common law or of Parliament. Over these centuries it has been the rolling back of ministerial claims to arbitrary power, exercised by the use of the royal prerogative, that has ...”

“... to explain why he should have ended by being a marginal figure, in crying need of posterity to grant him his due. Largely, he had himself to blame, because with his genius of mind there went an untameable insolence of behaviour. Henry James met the 36-year-old Peirce in Paris in 1875, and reported to his brother William ...”

“... of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans present. They felt it inappropriate that a leading English politician should condemn his countrymen in such forthright terms in front of foreigners – as they saw themselves. They were, of ...”

“... the tabloids. In America, as Brown points out, ‘no president … except Donald Trump … would grant access to the editor of the National Enquirer.’The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being described as a Pinner ...”

“... such things, cites 88. Some had fallen on hard times, like Lord Strathspey, 31st chief of the Clan Grant, who was living in reduced circumstances in Putney, but most of the rest kept smart London establishments in Mayfair or Regent’s Park; they simply no longer wanted a country house. Land management was time-consuming and increasingly uneconomical, staff ...”

“... till quite the Evening of the Wedding Day.’ Her last poem as a single woman, published in the St James Chronicle in 1763, was entitled ‘Imagination’s Search after Happiness’. It therefore seemed natural to her to use her talents to charm her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote ...”