“... study lies largely in the unfolding inevitability of this morality tale. The movement from the young Maudling, working genially alongside Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell in the late 1940s – Rab Butler’s three brilliant young men, all potential prime ministers – to the later figure, greedy, corrupt, drinking himself ...”

“... lover too. They fell in love while translating ancient Greek. Aldington, at 19, was too young for a ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum. Doolittle, who was 25, sat under the imposing dome, transcribing Greek materials. The two young poet-translators met daily, trying to make versions of verse from the ...”

“... into a description of the poems he hopes to write in the future, which include an epic on King Arthur. A Latinist as good as Milton might remind us (though his editors curiously do not) that the single usage of ‘turgidulus’ in classical poetry means something like ‘welling up with tears’ rather than ‘turgid with self-regard’. But once that ...”

“... remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition. Wilde’s younger son, Vyvyan, born in 1886, remembered him being ‘a real companion’ to himself and his brother. He had ‘so much of the child in his own nature that he delighted in playing our ...”

“... of course, it was often more tetchy, but appearances were decently kept up. No one supposed that Arthur Balfour, that inveterate political animal, was weary of politics when he pulled out in 1911, as he showed by insinuating himself into most of the Cabinets formed during the next twenty years. Like-wise, Austen Chamberlain’s displacement as Conservative ...”

“... draughtsmanship. For that he had recourse to an unidentified draughtsman he called “Arthur”, and more often to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘...”

“... workers had supported anti-fascist efforts ‘in Spain, Germany, Austria and other countries,’ Arthur Ballard wrote, ‘why not a fund to assist the colonial workers and peasants in the struggle against British imperialism?’ Ballard’s suggestion that the British left play a supporting role indicates that the lessons of recent history, from the Swadeshi ...”

“... and made transportation the greatest bottleneck in our war economy’. To Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Zuckerman and the Germans, it seemed as if the campaign gave the Allies the space they needed to establish a beachhead in Normandy and then push for Paris. There is of course no way of knowing what would have happened had Zuckerman’s advice been ...”

“... well as the run-up to Mau Mau in Kenya) took place under another noted Fabian Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Ranger is at pains to insist that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in ...”

“... incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos ...”

“... bears little resemblance to the archetypal Irish revolutionary as sketched by Tom Garvin: a young man from the country, aspiring and impatient, frustrated of opportunities, working at a level below that befitting his education. His Mayo background, as the son of a solicitor’s clerk in Castlebar, remained hugely important to him, however, and when the ...”

“... loathsome to her) reptiles. Melanie was the youngest of four children, of whom two were to die young, the third child Sidonie of scrofula at the age of eight and her adored brother Emmanuel at the age of 25, of heart failure brought about by tuberculosis and drug addiction. Emmanuel appears to have fantasised for some time about such an early ...”

“... Oxford from 1981 to 1989, his career has been all of a piece. The scholar, the actor, the dashing young subaltern and the Union debater, have all gone into the making of this extremely elegant and rather grand figure. In teaching, research and administration his career is a testament to the rise of a new professionalism in the Universities since 1945. But ...”

“... reviews of his production of Hamlet were so effusive that the acutely vain actor invited the young critic to meet him. At the end of 1878 Irving, by then actor-manager at the Lyceum, asked Stoker to come to London as front-of-house manager. It’s sometimes said that Irving, who exploited Stoker’s blind devotion to make outrageous demands on his time ...”

“... by the Sackvilles, was, in fact, a marriage of social equals. Nicolson was the younger son of Sir Arthur, 11th Baronet, later created a peer for his services in the Foreign Office as Permanent Under-Secretary 1910-16. Harold’s Hamilton grandmother owned a stately home in Co. Dublin. His uncle by marriage was the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Viceroy of ...”