“... In the sixth year of Queen Victoria’s reign two well-bred brothers-in-law faced each other with pistols in the fields of Camden Town and one shot the other dead. The survivor, who had issued the challenge, was sure that his Merciful and All-Seeing Maker would hold him guiltless, for he had been grievously wronged: in the course of a business dispute he had been ordered out of the other man’s house in front of a servant ...”

“... of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the City of London, and who could steer a man towards a governorship of a province worth as much as many a bishopric. Lyall’s clients seem not to have entered holy orders from any overwhelming desire to save ...”

“... When Bishop Berkeley wrote his philosophical treatise linking tar-water, that sovereign cure-all, with the sublimest mysteries of the Christian religion, a lay critic said it reminded him of the man who began by talking about Alexander’s battles and ended up by describing an Armenian wheelbarrow. That is how it was in the bar parlour of Wodehouse’s Angler’s Rest: ‘In our little circle I have known an argument on the Final Destination of the Soul to change inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving bacon fat ...”

“... What can Anne Edwards tell us about this business? Unfortunately she knows no more than anybody else and can only ask a string of questions. Eddy, first-born of Edward and Alexandra, the ‘dawdly’ flaccid prince with the long simian arms and the prominent collar and cuffs, armed with the potentially damning knowledge of how to disembowel deer, must be ...”

“... fell on Chiswick. It was ‘the weapon you never saw coming’, but in fact some observers on the East coast occasionally saw the vapour trails of V-2s rising from the launching sites in Holland (an experience akin to that of hearing the Ypres guns in the earlier war). Those Londoners who endured the rockets well remember how the impact preceded the sound of ...”

“... the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ‘Beachcomber’. Enough of that; the game is too easy to play. The entries are skilfully ‘potted’, judicious in the DNB manner, but the more one browses the more it is apparent that a double standard is operating. In one class, that of the learned editors, the physicists and the cataract surgeons, the ...”

“... the basic graces and affectations, but his own manners were as much in need of refining as anyone else’s. Yet this was the man who, as master of ceremonies, took it on himself to ban the wearing of swords at social functions, to discipline titled ladies on the dance floor, and to shout at booted squires: ‘Did you bring your horse as well?’ The story of ...”

“... of American Marines stacked like cordwood in Korea, awaiting shipment home. Heren, born in the East End of London, was taken on as a messenger boy in Printing House Square when Geoffrey Dawson was at the helm. If, fifty years on, he had succeeded to the editorship, he would have known better than to cast himself as an unofficial member of the ...”

“... an abiding mystery. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, bluntly, ‘Lear, a homosexual ...’ (why else, after all, would an Englishman live abroad?). Susan Chitty’s biography, That Singular Person Called Lear (1988), was presented as a study of ‘the complicated and fascinating psychology of the Victorian homosexual’, though its author concedes: ‘It ...”

“... swollen to the size of a melon, ‘which he did his best to ignore’, as one hopes everyone else did. Gout, the ancient podagra, has been called a disease of civilisation. According to this book a disorder traditionally linked with the cities of the West is now spreading in the more developed parts of the Third World. Yet gout seems never to be ...”

“... in which Chunee had been kept. Were the quarters of the Tower elephants any better? If nothing else, Chunee’s fate is a tale of hideous incompetence. How, the reader may wonder, did Hannibal dispose of unwanted elephants? How did cavemen ever contrive to dispatch a mammoth? Under a former trainer of Chunee, Alfred Cops (who once had a nasty encounter ...”

“... of compensating for salt deficiency by mixing cows’ urine in the milk: ‘I always gave someone else my share of this blend.’ Thesiger says things like: ‘I had no intention of marrying; I valued personal freedom too highly for that. As for money, I had no expensive tastes, and wanted only to serve in places remote from civilisation, where the cost of ...”

“... The great ocean liners were the landmarks, grace notes and sometimes the agents of history. Born as I was in the Belle Epoque, admittedly in its dying days, I was well placed to marvel at the mightiest moveable artefacts of that time: the ‘floating cities’ of Cunard’s four-funnelled, five-syllabled fleet, Lusitania, Aquitania and Mauretania. They were the civil equivalent of dreadnoughts and they competed with an aggressive Germany for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic, a non-existent but highly cherishable award for the fastest crossing, which the Lusitania snatched from the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907 ...”

“... Welcome, then, to this historic spa town, once calling itself the English Montpellier. The cherished waters, ideal for restoring the ‘animal functions’, have been reduced to a trickle from a single tap, hidden away from all but the curious; the Regency assembly rooms are the scene of a one-week monster carpet sale; and the crumbled colonnade for water-drinkers houses boutiques called Smarty Pants, Just Bums and Going for Bust ...”

“... How did the Great War – the first total war – affect the class structure of English society? An exhaustive answer, as Bernard Waites recognises, is probably beyond the power of any one historian. The difficulty is that class structure, or ‘social differentiation’, is something which, unlike crime or illegitimacy or whooping cough, defies both definition and statistical analysis ...”