“... so interested in South American fiction as they have since become, and few indeed were those who took an interest in South American politics – apart perhaps from worrying about the imperious interventions of North Americans, so eager to counter the threat of Communism in their hemisphere. Huneeus stimulated an interest in such matters which persisted in ...”

“... fame by standing outside singing a hymn while the major was engaged within; the latter afterwards took his boot to the missionary in no uncertain fashion. The Bombay Guardian found the fracas excellent copy. Missionary zeal also led Moss to acquire a tricycle as a means of chasing after ‘the carriages of some of the aristocratic official frequenters of the ...”

“... and a piping bullfinch. Masters tells us that one of her husband’s pets, an Amazon parrot, took a personal dislike to her. It wasn’t much of a life – despised by a parrot, kept sitting in the dark each evening while the animals slept, and married in name only – but better things were in store for Lois, who left London in 1940 to take up a post as ...”

“... flesh as passing shadows. Hardly was Budé told of Erasmus’s sense of outrage before he, too, took offence. Erasmus’s heart must have given a lurch when he saw the address on the letter: ‘From Guillaume Budé, his erstwhile friend, to Erasmus, with best wishes – and never again’. And it goes on in the same tone: ‘your ill-tempered ...”

“... consciousness of children makes them peculiarly susceptible to physical humiliation. Juniors took baths, one every three days, in a scruffy little room, four baths standing like islands on its stained red lino floor. We were washed and dried with detached vigour and once a fortnight our hair was washed with a harsh-smelling medicated shampoo, and our ...”

“... political vocabularies have been emptied of any possible meaning, these conjectures often took the form of jokes. One which appeared as a strip-cartoon in the pages of La Codorniz, a semi-clandestine Spanish version of Le Canard Enchaîné, went as follows: the young prince Felipe asks the king, whether there will be a public holiday when Franco ...”

“... as a soldier were seen at their best at the Battle of the Bulge, when the German offensive which took everyone by surprise was expertly contained. The Allies crossed the Rhine in good order, but there was trouble again over the invasion of Germany. Eisenhower, by now barely on speaking terms with Montgomery, decided not to try to get first to Berlin, an ...”

“... go wrong and absorb more forces ... quote a strong body wanted just to leave it on one side. But John Fieldhouse and I were quite keen to have a go because we thought we could do it and also felt we needed a success. We hadn’t many successes politically. We also needed a success militarily to get Ministers to believe in what are could do because a lot of ...”

“... Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near ...”

“... King Canute has had a raw deal from history. He took his throne down to the beach in order to show his servile courtiers that not even a king could control the waves (that was in God’s power alone). But, ironically, he is now most often remembered as the silly old duffer who got soaked on the seashore because he thought he could master the tides ...”

“... nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar expropriations throughout the region, which Washington could no longer afford to deal with in a ‘piecemeal fashion’. There was a metaphysics of Allende-hating that went beyond matters ...”

“... in homage to his autobiography. But present-day readers seem to feel much as Auden did, when he took up Davies for a few weeks as a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of exasperated marginalia – ‘vulgar’, ‘silly’, ‘you ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... daring of her escape to London, where, with the help of a beloved governess, Helen Rootham, she took a flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater. Here she and Rootham lived on a grudging and uncertain allowance from Sir George, plus what they could earn. Thereafter, Sitwell was always short of money and as each generation passed she was left or positively ...”

“... compass, depending on which direction most appealed to me at the time. The first of these walks took me northeast up the Lea Valley, through Epping Forest, then followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to ...”