“... enough to grasp this too; she draws apt attention to the Bowen syndrome (also evident in Rose Macaulay) of being infinitely sociable and at the same time infinitely solitary. Bowen said that writing novels was a way of working off ‘the sense of being solitary and farouche’. By writing she became ‘relatable’. If one were ‘house-trained ...”

“... family and social life. When Flush was published in 1933, feminist reviewers (Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay among them) immediately drew parallels between the spaniel and Elizabeth Barrett, seeing his story as her psychological biography: she is petted and confined like him, always subject to the will of others. Flush marks the distance Woolf gave ...”

“... to ponder over, will not be heavy company. One of the great men of the Holland House circle was Macaulay: but Macaulay did not, apparently, converse. He overwhelmed his hearers with a tidal wave of learning which they were too stunned to check or divert. On the other hand, some of the wits, who gave the talk at Holland ...”

“... the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the need to ...”

“... by monogamous marriage, gender relationships were moralised and domesticated and women’s status rose steadily from mere ‘objects of animal love’ to men’s ‘faithful friends and agreeable companions’. Or as one populariser of these ideas put it: ‘When nations begin to emerge from gross barbarism, every new step which they take towards refinement ...”

“... around some central feature, as with his restoration of Maddocks’s Town Hall at Tremadoc or his Rose Corner cottages dominating the crossroads at Bolesworth. By now he was involved in his ‘amenity brigade’, in those DIA Guides and admonitions, coupling conservation of past architectures with the creation of small, exemplary new communities, but in no ...”

“... were seeking to build a new residential area north of Oxford Street. Only a generation later Macaulay, speaking on the Reform Bill, enthused over ‘that immense city which lies to the north of Great Russell Street and Oxford Street, a city superior in size and in population to the capitals of many mighty kingdoms; and probably superior in ...”

“... spiced with delectable quotations. It draws not only on family documents, but on the writings of Macaulay, Emily Eden, Lady Canning, Bishop Heber, Kipling, Diana Cooper and Forster; and it comments, sometimes with disfavour, on films like Gandhi, The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown. If a book on this scale had been written by an American it would ...”

“... and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you are not a soldier; you can be of no use to us here.’ ‘Sir,’ answered Godfrey, ‘I run no more hazards than Your Majesty.’ ‘Not so,’ said William. ‘I am ...”

“... elite: Dalhousie, Canning, Mayo and Dufferin. The liberal quartet of the Mills (father and son), Macaulay and Henry Maine wrote a lot about India, and even more has been written about them. But theirs was largely an India of the imagination. The Mills never went; Macaulay lasted four years and Maine six. India could ...”

“... was Edmund Wilson’s nickname); Francis Abernathy is the wimp; and the twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, are the beauties. The members of the gang have no life outside their poses. There is nothing here unmotivated, no detail that is not telling (‘he carried an umbrella, a bizarre sight in Hampden’), no revelation that is not a disclosure. Too ...”

“... part of his period. Scott, Southey, Carlyle, Disraeli, Roscoe, Dickens, Cobden, Bright, Ruskin, Macaulay, Eliot, Gaskell, Arnold, Chadwick and Toulmin-Smith are all there; and so are Tocqueville, Guizot and Sismondi. At some cost to coherence, the star-studded cast rolls by. Nor are the arts forgotten. One reason Hunt so fiercely champions Britain’s old ...”

“... the capacity of modern statesmen to live up to them has undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had ...”

“... the Young Conservatives of the Seventies and Eighties, when pubescent Tory Boys like William Hague rose at Conference to mouth the Thatcher mantra. Now everyone has at least one ambitious friend who has gone into New Labour politics. Enormous numbers of twenty-somethings, well-educated and well-spoken, man the network of researchers, advisers, liaison ...”

“... after its bombing by the IRA – most insistently by Morris’s SPAB. It, too, was disregarded. Rose Macaulay’s visceral reaction to the bombing of London – and with it the loss of her house and her lover – was the raw expression of the wreckage of her life. For her the Blitz was an ‘an irremediable barbarism coming out of the earth, and of ...”