“... so. Perhaps the greatest of them, Reynold Bray, an abrasive, straight-talking midlander who it was said could ‘do anything’ with the king, went by plain ‘Mr Bray’. The greatest nobles in the land pledged him their loyalty and service – a collection of their correspondence to him, scrapingly obsequious, is held in Westminster Abbey – knowing that a ...”

“... from the superb Carolingian manuscript then in England and now in Utrecht, it should not have been said, without a word of warning, that they ‘presumably reflect Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical usage’. One can see what Professor Fell means when she dismisses the – potentially appalling – implications of the Anglo-Saxon penitentials, because it is true that ...”

“... are, like him, lawyers. ‘I took my son to make his first appearance in the Supreme Court,’ he said. ‘He looked at the portraits of the old judges and there he saw his grandfather.’ Youssef Hakim, Jacques’s father, had been an Ottoman-trained jurist who served on the Court during the country’s brief moment of independence under King Faisal in ...”

“... rather than be thought ‘difficult’.A propos of which is Whitman’s description of himself to Edward Carpenter: ‘An old hen … with something in my nature furtive’.2 February. Late for a final rehearsal for the tour of Talking Heads I rush out of the house on this bright spring-like morning to be confronted by a large pile of excrement on the ...”

“... In the title story of Edward Upward’s new collection, a forgotten Marxist author of the Thirties dreams that he is approached by a present-day admirer, a ‘lecturer at a Yorkshire polytechnic’. At first Stephen Highwood is suspicious. He doesn’t expect people to know who he is. His books have long been out of print and are not to be found in public libraries ...”

“... moment term ended. One friend, on holiday in southern Italy in 1957, saw two men in a field and said to her husband: ‘But look, it’s Eric!’ And, she recalled, ‘it really was Eric, with a peasant. He was interviewing the peasant.’ Untrammelled curiosity is an excellent quality in a historian – none better – but it has to be turned inward if one ...”

“... poet-painter was the 20th child of a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature ...”

“... family money comes from importing timber (as the Howard family money did). Three sons, Hugh, Edward and Rupert, follow into the business after their father, who is called the Brig because he’s never been in the military, in one of those family in-jokes that aren’t really funny, just tenderly well-worn. The Brig’s wife is the Duchy, another ...”

“... consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity might be ...”

“... by the chronic excess of US imports over exports is held to be of small account, because these are said to be little more than dead-end jobs, in declining industries. Deregulation, most recently of telecommunications, is similarly justified by the wonderful opportunities it opens up for the New Titans, as well as for the new-style ‘lean and mean’ telephone ...”

“... Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near ...”

“... be haphazard and full of randomness’, would indeed have been as slow and sprawling as they said. That, presumably, is why he didn’t write it. The book he wrote instead is exceedingly shapely and controlled, and not tedious in the least. Raban, who calls himself ‘incorrigibly bookish’ (he alludes more than once to his days as a university lecturer ...”

“... vaccine had not, indeed could not, have been made locally. They didn’t have the equipment, they said; they couldn’t possibly have produced a vaccine at a primitive lab like that. But Kanyama explained that he had started working in Paul Osterrieth’s virology department at LMS on 12 February 1958, and that Osterrieth had already been making polio vaccine ...”

“... Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which caused George V to erupt with rage. On the ...”

“... it is not being allowed to recognise that you are disillusioned. (As Winnicott once said, it doesn’t matter what a child feels provided they are allowed to feel it.) There is a lie at the heart of democracy if the state will sacrifice its citizens’ freedom to take dissent to the limit, and indeed its relationship to them, for the sake of its ...”