“... When Malcolm Muggeridge and I were young we used to speculate about the end of civilisation. Little did we expect it would come in our lifetimes. I regard myself as a loyal member of the Labour Party. By this I mean that I usually disagree with what it does. Take the indignation against the cricketers who have gone to play cricket in South Africa. I am ...”

“... is that Brexit has so overwhelmed the business of government and public discourse that there is little legislation of any significance and, as a result, nothing to vote on. Three-line whips on a Wednesday or a Thursday are now virtually unheard of. Sometimes weeks go by without a meaningful vote. Many MPs have young families to whom they are anxious to ...”

“... to London – via Florence, Tibet, Persia, Mecca, Khartoum and Montpellier (where he undertook a little research into coal-tar derivatives) – to surprise Dr Watson at his Paddington consulting rooms some years later, in the guise of an elderly bibliophile. By the time of Holmes’s resurrection in ‘The Empty House’ (1903), ...”

“... at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold presence in human life and culture’. Knight concludes that ‘Robin Hood’s biography is mythic in that the multiform figure does not have physical identity.’ His biography is thus doubly ...”

“... basis of the Folk Club movement, powerfully renewed these memories, and cast them in epic form (Arthur Scargill’s first job, when he joined the Barnsley Young Communist League, was to be made ‘Ballads and Blues’ secretary). Aneurin Bevan, a glittering representative of the South Wales coalfield, and the most accomplished orator of his day, made the ...”

“... his death meant liberation. Her breezy assumption that there would always be enough money, with a little left over, caused her friends and family much bother. She was also a publisher’s nightmare: the genial George Smith ruefully recalled that her manuscripts were ‘a medley of pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, written here and there and fastened ...”

“... When love meets love, breast to breast, God interposes, An unacknowledged guest, And leaves a little child among our roses. We love, God makes: in our sweet mirth God spies occasion for a birth.Then is it his, or is it ours? I know not – he is fond of flowers. The notion of linking Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and ...”

“... Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun can hardly be dismissed as unimportant, but it must be said that little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has yielded to ...”

“... His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits. But Arthur doesn’t take it lying down: no longer a sportsman but still a man. Storey adapted his original novel for Lindsay Anderson, who directed the film, but he curtailed the ending. On the printed page, after Machin’s legs have ‘betrayed’ him on the ...”

“... particular talent is as much a tribute to the post-war grammar school as it is to the wonders of Little Richard. Brought up by the bookish and financially comfortable Aunt Mimi, Lennon was shaped by the conflicts of the bright working-class kid in the grammar crammer. Selected to make social progress and clearly intellectually able, he instead devoted almost ...”

“... hands. The Trinity men soon attracted influential support: from the future Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour, from J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron) and from the distinguished physicists Oliver Lodge and Balfour Stewart. Since then the links between scientific heroes and psychical research have always been close. In his foreword to the two ...”

“... and in mental and physical prowess, and a narcissistic conviction that they were born to lead. Arthur Balfour had led the parents, and Raymond Asquith set the pace and tone for the children, with Grenfell and the others soaring strenuously after him through Eton and Balliol, All Souls and the City, a confidently exclusive ...”

“... prayers for his release to the Twelfth Imam, the ‘Master of Time’ venerated by the Shia, by little reed boats launched on the Tigris.) The historian of Iraq Hanna Batatu delivers a more instructive account of the Chalabis’ adroit political manoeuvrings under the ancien regime in his exhaustive work The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary ...”

“... The poet of home and hearth, of family values and traditional roles, was a single mother. Captain Arthur Hemans had walked out of the family home in 1818, when his wife was pregnant with their fifth son. What’s more, her father had deserted her as well, leaving his wife when Felicia was a child. Felicia Hemans wrote for money, a vulgarity which compelled ...”

“... and renewing his decent grief.’ At the Coronation he notes the judges like red caterpillars, a little boy playing with his sword until his mother takes it away, urchins playing scratch cricket in a side-street as the crowd disperses; he saves his most withering asides for Archbishop Temple, so old that he can’t rise after doing homage, and, unable to ...”