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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one of her own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... extraordinary chapter caused consternation among many of the proof-readers: as Elizabeth Jordan said later, it ‘proved to be the explosion of a bomb-shell on our literary hearthstone’. With the privilege of a leading position, she could elaborate ‘facts’ altogether freely, and had the old-maid aunt, rejuvenating to 34, acquire (in her own account) a ...”

“... irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put nothing past the mesmeric influence on him of “that woman”.’ When it’s another royal duchess’s turn to be out of favour, Harris shelters behind an editorial in the Daily Telegraph: ‘But it is interesting and significant that the ...”

“... dexterity in anticipating criticism allows. The title is, of course, a sidelong reference to Edward Said’s Orientalism. Cannadine thinks it is time we ‘reoriented Orientalism’ by recognising that the British understanding of the native peoples of the Empire did not automatically rest on the construction of an inferior, and naturally ...”