“... Régime. All belonged to a nobility accustomed for centuries to serve the state, and once this service was no longer required, they adopted an ironic and fatalistic attitude to their future. There was no point fighting against History: better to decline with dignity. Don Fabrizio watched ‘the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever ...”

“... arising from drug-taking, the latter his attempted dismissal of Percy Loraine from the Foreign Service. His complaint was that Percy had given him irrefutable but unwelcome advice – always an unforgivable offence in Edward’s eyes. When the facts of the Loraine case were first made public, there ensued a chorus of denunciation, not of Edward, but of ...”

“... precisely from the skill with which he has blocked off implication and afterthought. Long ago, Robert Bridges observed about one of Keats’s lines that ‘it displayed its poetry rather than its meaning.’ That was once a criticism, certainly, but neither the old nor the new Decorated styles are subject to the censure that attends the absence of meaning ...”

“... under which ministers operate, together with the precedents and prejudices of those in the Civil Service who were responsible for advising on policy and for carrying out the wishes of ministers. The years that followed the war were a time of great agricultural expansion: the nation was short of food and short of money to buy it from overseas. There was a ...”

“... 30 seconds of gunplay in a flat in the Latin Quarter in 1975 when he shot dead two French security service officers together with a Lebanese accomplice who had reluctantly led them to him. Although members of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, as it was then known, were supposed to carry pistols, all three turned out to have been unarmed. Then on ...”

“... voters thought about the last six years of Labor government on the eve of the election, the civil service seemed to have reached a view.Australia has had far less to worry about than most post-2008 economies, with China hoovering up its minerals and crude oil, and Labor – praised for its efforts by the IMF – bent on generous public spending ...”

“... piece of work, a little bit underpowered, but with a thesis’; ‘this biography does useful service, but not much more.’ His self-assessments could be equally brusque: ‘I exaggerate a little, but not outrageously’ – this in an essay entitled ‘Is Michael Neve paranoid?’, a question that answers itself, though the piece answers a different ...”

“... not generally enjoyed by today’s Muslim minorities. Two of my paternal uncles, John and Robert, were blond and blue-eyed. John, in fact, was deployed after war service to the British Mandate force in Palestine. In uniform, he went into a Jewish-owned shop, and the shopkeeper said to a customer to whom she was ...”

“... and more senior general, who had once commanded the garrison in Hong Kong, recommended him for service in the Maritime Customs. Academic grief was actuarial good luck. Gazetted into his future employment just before the outbreak of war, and issued with an ‘outfit allowance’ of £100, he was contractually bound to five years’ ...”

“... in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to ...”

“... some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the young Louis V in 987, the claims of his uncle, Charles of Lorraine, were contested by Hugh Capet, count of Paris.Hugh’s success owed much to the support of ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... Dunbar wrote, seemed to be: ‘Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us.’Service in the First World War also brought little lasting improvement in the Black condition. In the Crisis, the monthly publication of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois urged Black men to enlist as soldiers to make real the promise of equality. Those who tried to heed ...”

“... most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and so, almost inevitably, he found himself in mid-1940 working for the BBC, first in the Monitoring Service, later in the Chinese section of the Overseas Service. Haffenden’s huge ...”

“... Not while Rupert’s still around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give the ...”