“... This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. ‘Do you know,’ he wrote to his old schoolfriend Bill Townend in April 1939, ‘a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present . . . No war in our lifetime is my feeling.’ He was not alone in this lack of prescience, but few of his fellow ...”

“... particularly interesting species of the genus’. Burghley’s son Robert Cecil seems to fit the bill rather better. Yet even he, inhabiting, as his biographer Pauline Croft notes, ‘the grey world of administration’, was a different species from Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, or even George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and the title of her essay puts ...”

“... the guards had to be called from St James’s to restore order and the night ended with a £100 bill for damages and a great deal of heated comment in the papers. According to one of the supper party, Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend Joseph ‘Spanco’ Spence in Oxford, ‘it has been the talk of ...”

“... and a shiny new penny.’ Despite living for many years in London and New York (and marrying Tina Brown), Evans has retained an agreeable touch of puzzled or even prudish innocence: ‘the effing and blinding that is the vernacular today’ was unknown in his family. Perhaps he doesn’t realise just how interesting he is in this respect. He comes from a ...”

“... of Macaulay’s lacerating review) began political life by passionately opposing the Great Reform Bill in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals ...”

“... in functional and aesthetic performance’ – it had to go Pop. For Banham, Archigram fitted the bill, and in 1963 this adventurous group (Peter Cook, Ron Herron et al) proclaimed ‘throwaway architecture’ as the future of design. Archigram took as its models ‘the capsule, the rocket, the bathyscope, the Zipark and the handy-pak’, and celebrated ...”

“... The receiving clerk described him as 5 foot 8½ inches tall, 140 pounds in weight, with grey eyes, brown hair and a sallow complexion. (However, in a passport application in 1914 he is an inch shorter, and his eyes are blue.) His face was ‘full of pimples’ and ‘pitted’ with small scars – the facial lesions associated with secondary ...”

“... who have been milling about the capital for two decades but whose command has now shifted from Bill to Hillary. Despite their differing styles, the intent is the same: rewarding friends and punishing enemies, the latter with such precision that one of her staffers fears Hillary will come to seem little different from ‘Nixon in a pantsuit’. The sense of ...”

“... a hairdresser is born. The beauty of the girl’s hair when closely inspected plays a part. ‘The brown was more than just brown. It was a million shades of glossy reds and a melange of dark chestnuts. The hair slid through his fingers like silk, each strand light as gossamer.’ But it’s the charged interaction with Keir ...”

“... his wars with his Muslim neighbours. The hostages were rescued, albeit at vast expense (the final bill for the expedition, at £9 million, was nearly double the original estimates), and Theodore committed suicide in his ruined fortress, shooting himself in the mouth with a pistol he had been given as a present by Victoria. The fortress was cleared, its ...”

“... A huge crowd has gathered. Alexander Bloch from PEN, an elegant figure in a pin-striped suit and brown suede shoes, nods towards the speakers and says: ‘The strong, silent Russian hasn’t been invented yet.’ Madame Bloch asks me if I do not think the translation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera rather ‘unfortunate’. Our programme says we are to see it ...”

“... a bath. The flat was always warm with the communal central heating kept going in the basement by Bill, the boilerman, and often after a bath, in the living room, my parents would play a game of ‘He’, where ‘He’ was naked me, twisting out of their reach and running away from one, whose fingers tickled their way between my legs to my vulva, to the ...”

“... was thinking of returning to England. The approximate day of his departure is established by a bill of exchange, which records that he deposited 35 rupees with the Ambassador and was authorised to draw the same amount from the English factors in Surat. The date of this bill is 13 November 1617. The route of his last ...”

“... combined blue-white-grey-pink at the bottom of the bed in L’Affaire de Camden Town, in the red-brown hatched brushstrokes on the woman’s shin and breasts, and the way the white shirtsleeve of the man looking down at her becomes duck-egg blue in the shadow, his face terracotta. Look closely at Dawn, Camden Town (sometimes known as Summer in Naples) and ...”

“... Maybe he just forgot how good he was in Total Recall. New York was buzzy with parties, as Tina Brown might say. In fact she did say it, about something or other, on her new weekly television show Topic [A], with Tina Brown, which created its own buzz by having Hendrik Hertzberg and Armstrong Williams slug it out about ...”