“... I don’t remember exactly what Relf’s involvement was in the case that I sat through. I do remember that the defendant was convicted by the jury and sentenced by a crusty old English judge to a short term of imprisonment. The judge, who one might imagine would have had little sympathy with this newfangled legislation, gave the defendant a stern ...”

“... each other.’ Warner was quick to imagine bisexuality as a kind of physiological oscillation. ‘Do we do it in alternate spasms, do you think, like synchronised oysters … or is one both at once?’ The book’s author, Theodore J. Faithfull, described on the title page as ‘principal ...”

“... good fortune not merely of an opposition party which chose first Foot and then Kinnock to do battle against her, but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be ...”

“... transition plans. He didn’t know how many people worked in the White House and that they’d all have to be replaced. He neglected to call the State Department before he called Putin. Obama charmed him during their first meeting, and now he may keep some bits of Obamacare – forget all those years he spent saying the president was born in Kenya. He ...”

“... In 1997, for Eight Months Gone, he painted a nude portrait of the pregnant supermodel Jerry Hall. A year later, when she was too ill to show up for a couple of sittings – having posed for months while Freud painted her breastfeeding – he punished Hall by substituting her face with that of his assistant ...”

“... his book Practical Criticism he attracted audiences so large they couldn’t fit into the lecture hall. In the course of a career that allowed him plenty of time for reading and writing – he wasn’t one to be corralled into administrative duties – Griffiths published only a monograph about Victorian poetry and, in collaboration with Matthew Reynolds, an ...”

“... forms and his own arcane system of geometry, he was aided by mentors and patrons for whom he could do little wrong, despite his often dismissive attitude to both budget and brief. Country houses made Lutyens’s name, and his workload and assiduity caused considerable jealousy among his peers, but he wanted to be acclaimed as an architect of public ...”

“... on the defeat of the British army in South Africa. He held an anti-war meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, the heartland of Chamberlain’s political fief, and insisted that it go ahead when everyone from the chief constable down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union ...”

“... Dellums, Oakland’s septuagenarian mayor, addressed a crowd of protesters on the steps of City Hall. Dellums, immediately recognisable by his sculptured Afro – which, over the decades, has gone from jet black to snow white – looked shattered, dejected and defenceless. In earlier decades the mayor would have been standing alongside the ...”

“... worked on the assumption that anyone who was paid by someone else couldn’t help but do their employer’s bidding. The poor were apparently not ‘so chary of their soales health’ as substantial people whose oaths were unquestionable. Wages paid in kind – normal in a credit economy – caused more problems for those who had to labour for ...”

“... the school and under the Forth’, their fathers mined, then decorated the art rooms and the hall with pictures of swarming prehistoric life. A mother came to complain that her son had ‘done no work’ for a fortnight, he had been ‘taking encyclopedias home and reading them to all hours’ instead of doing ‘the kind of work that will help him to be ...”

“... self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society gossip and by the hostile accounts of the Beaverbrook circle. Attendants at his Indian court did not ...”

“... thereby greatly weakened. The sources of Thomson’s style are well documented by Charles McKean, David Walker and David Watkin. It is clear that he looked closely at the works of the vigorous school of northern Classicism, and he admitted to having certain favourites. In an 1866 pamphlet attacking Scott’s Gothic designs ...”

“... insistence on the working-class share of this growth. Is there a ladder of green awareness? Do we move on from supporting the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, or the Society for the Protection of Rural England, to an understanding of the broader concerns these particular enthusiasms reflect? Is saving the whales inextricably tied up with ...”

“... in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most ...”