“... oblong, someone up early on a winter morning. And I think of my parents putting radiators in their home, dark slices of metal toast in every room. Before, it was so cold of a morning I’d leave the next day’s clothes at the end of the bed, and I’d dress under the blanket. Knickers, socks, vest and hand- knitted jersey. Never without a jersey. I think of ...”

“... significant department for the Prime Minister – the ‘hole in the centre of the system’, as Lord Hunt put it. That most premiers have managed to live with this situation is testament to the strength of the amateur tradition in British politics. Even Macmillan, for all his perception of the problem, still preferred to govern by means of haphazard and ...”

“... prime minister, Earl Grey, who in years to come would be happy to present the white wand of a Lord Chamberlain to the sixth Duke. Reared in a confusion of progeny, a social worker’s nightmare, the sixth Duke, in spite of the odd lapse, failed to live down to the standards of his forebears. His coming-of-age celebrations at Hardwick Hall held wicked ...”

“... Mr Justice Marshall and a jury; convicted; and committed suicide. Passus et sepultus est. Finally, Lord Denning inquired into it all as a one-man Tribunal, and duly reported. And that, bar the strident shouting, moralising and general excitement, was that. When Harold Macmillan, the prime minister of the day, later resigned, the Profumo Scandal was thought to ...”

“... of commenting on all aspects of the struggle. As is usual in criticism of Allied strategy, it is Lord Alanbrooke who is the chief target. It was he who had the most effective influence over Churchill, it was he who consistently tried to delay any large-scale operations across the Channel and who believed that the war would be won in the Mediterranean and in ...”

“... views, at a time of momentous events between the two great wars. In the service of the late Lord Darlington, at Darlington Hall, Stevens was Miltonically aware that they also serve who only stand and wait. Service, indeed, has been Stevens’s guiding principle through a long professional career. He has thought much about ‘dignity’, as a quality to ...”

“... titillation in the course of the laughs, which would only have been possible in the days of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. But as in all Rattigan’s plays there was a subtext, as Geoffrey Wansell appropriately calls it, some unspoken secret lurking underneath, which excited an audience (particularly an audience of those famous Aunt Ednas for whom ...”

“... to what he called ‘chewing barbed wire in Flanders’ was Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, who in December 1914 began proposing schemes which bypassed the Western Front. None found favour, so he came up with a different idea, proposing to knock Turkey out of the war using just an elderly section of the British fleet. No military ...”

“... the longest serving ministers in the history of the Labour Party. He spent 13 years in office, as home secretary, foreign secretary, leader of the House of Commons and justice minister. His book’s title, Last Man Standing, derives from the curious rule by which the lord chancellor (which Straw became in 2007, at the same ...”

“... could not be given too much importance: its purpose was to help us feel better about ourselves at home, not to hinder our management of unruly natives. Just as ‘air cover’ had no clear legal base, so the use of force to destroy the will of opponents was without legal justification. Yet it was often used and usually worked: a few early and apparently ...”

“... phenomenon, with a suggestion of Beowulf about it (another of the Borges admirations), and The Lord of the Rings as one of its longer, more popular texts. America lacks this type of magician – the shamans there are grander, more worldly, more pretentious – and the German-style version of Hesse or Grass is too instinctively metaphysical, not homespun ...”

“... his biography. But I wish I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 ...”

“... On a June night in 1917, in his home at Walton Heath in Surrey, the Prime Minister asked to be roused at 3 a.m., because there was something he did not want to miss: the big bang from afar which would signify that British sappers had blown the top off the German-held Messines ridge. The sound came through on schedule ...”

“... is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course. Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European ...”

“... on the coast of Madagascar, where New York merchants often brought them supplies and news from home, and then making for the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the coast of India. Their obvious prey was the shipping of those parts rather than the large, powerful East Indiamen, but that made things no pleasanter for the Company, which was held responsible ...”