“... of the Somme, and who were coming to realise that the war which was supposed to bring them ‘Home by Christmas’ was lengthening to no apparent end or purpose. On 16 July 1916, Sassoon writes: I’m thinking of England, and summer evenings after cricket-matches, and sunset above the tall trees, and village-streets in the dusk, and the clatter of a ...”

“... Marches, in effect governor of Wales, an office he retained when Elizabeth sent him to Ireland as Lord Deputy. Continentals addressed Philip as ‘son of England’s president over all Wales’, son of the ‘viceroy of Ireland’ (which lent a kind of princely status). In writing to the man running Poland, Languet drew attention not only to Sidney’s Dudley ...”

“... giving an impression that Jones, who was raised in London and had an English mother, was more at home in the land of his father than was in fact the case. Around the time of the Blitz, however, something happened to Thomas’s verse and – more markedly – to Eliot’s that did not happen to Jones’s. Two poets hitherto noted for their obscurity, and for ...”

“... So and So (in Ralegh’s case probably his half-brother Humphrey), who might talk to his good Lord Such and Such, who might get you a moment with the even more elevated Lady Herself, who might if you were lucky be a gentlewoman of the queen’s bedchamber, and who might see about your petition for the reversion of an office or talk to the master of the ...”

“... The poet​ and songwriter Sydney Carter – remember ‘Lord of the Dance’? – wasn’t the only observer to notice that the 1950s British folk song revival was being accompanied, and occasionally drowned out, by the clang of cash registers. His song ‘Man with the Microphone’ began:As I roved out one morningI was singing a country songI met a man with a microphoneAnd oh he did me wrong ...”

“... Investiture at Caernarvon came immediately after the joint BBC/IBA film of the Royal Family at home. Anthony Holden suggests that, when watching the Investiture, people were more aware of the domestic than of the ceremonial aspect. He may have got it slightly wrong. It is the combination of the two which is fascinating: not the thought that the hero of the ...”

“... George Cony​ , a London merchant, had once been a friend of Oliver Cromwell. But when the Lord Protector slapped a tax on silk imports without the consent of Parliament, Mr Cony protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him ...”

“... mother, drove dizzily out of the hospital, stopped at a grill-covered shop, bought my paper, went home and read – after I’d shaved and bathed and dozed for an hour or two in a stupor of joy greater than any I’d known before, or expect to know ever again – the story of how an amusing, charming, clever and now inconsolable man was one day leading a more ...”

“... has New Mexico. So many joys. It don’t make sense. Then it makes sense. A woman out there home-schools her son. She breastfeeds him until the boy is four. They both are happy and seem smart and well. She’s America! Meet you in New York. Meet you at the zoo. Let’s meet at the Met. Carnegie Hall tonight. She breastfed him until the boy was four ...”

“... time happened to reach the gaol in time to drive off the people. Crowds again gathered outside Lord Kingsborough’s lodgings and tried to break in.’ ‘Mob’ suggests mindlessness and lack of civility. ‘Some sort’ is also dismissive. ‘By good fortune’ for whom? Hardly for ‘the mob’. ‘Drive off’ as opposed to persuade, or convince, or ...”

“... to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, Thompson mused, you could write a convincing history of English radicalism as it was warped by espionage. Government spies penetrated and provoked, infiltrated and informed with unbelievable zeal – and success. The ...”

“... 19 March, four days before Boris Johnson went on TV to tell the British public ‘you must stay at home,’ Lee Cain, his belligerent head of communications, convened a virtual meeting to discuss Covid-19 messaging. (The Telegraph described the meeting under the headline ‘Anatomy of a Perfect Slogan’.) Until then Johnson had taken a laissez-faire ...”

“... Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... The stately home is England’s most characteristic contribution to international tourism. Many countries have old houses which are open to the public. But neither the châteaux of the Loire nor the Palladian villas of the Brenta nor the antebellum homes of Natchez can offer the spectacle of an ancient house, set in its own gardens and park, surrounded by its agricultural estates, crammed with furniture, books and paintings from the past and, best of all, still occupied by a descendant of the family which built it ...”

“... but Reagan was a master manipulator of public anxiety about enemies abroad and menacing aliens at home, about assertive women and blacks, and even about the unchecked Federal Government itself. ‘The President,’ as Auerbach puts it, ‘had gone from exorcist of fear to its agent.’ The book that she conceived in these cowering years was to be based on the ...”