“... a remarkably deliberate one. In the normal way letters are written – unless one happens to be Lord Chesterfield – because they have to be or because more or less involuntary occasion calls them forth. But these two were almost morbidly aware of what they were letting themselves in for. Hart-Davis’s first letter, on 23 October 1955, begins (with a ...”

“... at me and nodded, ‘It’s cold.’ ‘What is this place? What brings you here?’ ‘This is my home,’ we replied. Widow’s Walk On the passeggiata, on the rocks at the Marinella Bar again, losing what remains of my language to a thickening rain, a week of rain that’s almost stopped the sea. Trying to escape myself, but there’s always someone wanting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that his Whig interlocutors would ever be capable of unseating the detested Tory government of Lord North. In a letter to his friend Edmund Burke he complained that his aristocratic fellow guests were ‘as unfit to storm a citadel as they would be proper for the defence of it’. Burke’s response, dated 8 October 1777, has been much anthologised. It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”