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“... most dangerous product of modern civilisation – still, as in Florence, accompanied by the young Lord Douglas, the two of them put on the Index in both London and Paris and, were one not so far away, the most compromising companions in the world’. Wilde, he wrote, was ‘charming, at the same time; unimaginable, and, above all, a very great personality ...”

“... subtitle, ‘interpreters of our cultural tradition’. It may be stretching a point to include Lord Leverhulme in that category. The preservation of the cultural tradition costs money, and Leverhulme had lots and used it honourably, recognising that nature and art are ‘needs of the mind’. Soap ads and drawings of Port Sunlight are here augmented by ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has ...”

“... and nibbling at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual commitments, but ...”

“... described as a ‘working-class agitator and politician’. On his ennoblement, Marshal of the RAF Lord Douglas of Kirtleside admitted to being ‘a moderate socialist’, which, as his biographer explains, made him ‘a somewhat unusual member of the higher military hierarchy’. There also seems to be much more space devoted to practitioners of ...”

“... example. Perhaps even this is not required: the ‘standards of perfection’ might require it, Lord Justice Lawton said in the first Court of Appeal judgment, but inquiries need not be perfect. When he first considered the question, Lord Denning said that individuals should be afforded ‘a fair opportunity for ...”

“... abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets away with ...”

“... role in the slave trade or scrambled to defend their property from the strategic abolitionism of Lord Dunmore. Schama even manages to present the American Revolution, in the South at least, as being waged ‘first and foremost to protect slavery’, an audacious claim. His contrast between a Britain of eccentric abolitionists and an America of tyrannical ...”

“... efforts failed to establish Oliver Cromwell securely in the Victorian pantheon. The names of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington summon up public houses rather than heroes. Winston Churchill in this century, like the Elder Pitt in the 18th and the Younger Pitt in the 19th, was buried with ceremony then swiftly consigned to history: which means that ...”

“... immediacy and metaphysical urgency, his material weight and his spiritual profundity. So Clive James can’t be blamed for joining the ranks of the respectable failures. He has given us a Dante who is approachable and affable, and almost always readable, but who is unequivocally heavy rather than fluid or mellifluous. When ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... agreement, who acted uprightly and failed, seeps through, as does his dislike of De Valera and Sir James Craig. His good guys were duped and let down, while the last two died in their beds, full of Irish honours. Thus O’Connell and Parnell seem to react primarily to English stimuli, and the autonomous growth of Sinn Fein occurs in a chapter given over ...”

“... Elizabeth’s; Mary’s is a bit taller too, as arranged by her son and Elizabeth’s successor, James VI and I. Other bona fide royal treasures which the busy visitor mostly passes by include Henry III’s gorgeous 13th-century mosaic Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, and the portrait of Richard II, the abbey’s other profligate royal patron. It ...”

“... to Ian Fleming, with whom she’d been infatuated for most of her life. Her previous husbands, Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, and Lord O’Neill, never counted for much, though she had had a glamorous life with Rothermere and had been in love with him for a few years when still married to O’Neill. Being ...”

“... of reasoning: they accepted that to separate Gracie and Rosie would be deliberately to kill Rosie. Lord Justice Ward argued that this act was one of ‘quasi self-defence’ (with the doctors acting on Gracie’s behalf). Rosie, he wrote, ‘may have a right to life, but she has little right to be alive. She is alive because and only because, to put it ...”