“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... to their regular officers, or the pupils at some repressive and corrupt boarding school to their masters. The Poles, quite simply, did not choose the political system under which they live, and given the chance would repudiate it in favour of some kind of social democratic state with a mixed economy. This, in spite of decades of Party propaganda to the ...”

“... spreadsheet jigsaw, mapping the stories from the Sartre biographies (Annie Cohen-Solal, John Gerassi, Ronald Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The ...”

“... natives of the colonial imagination – a reversal of the book’s intention. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt generously suggest that the choice of ‘savage’ might have been an ironic reference to the anthropological vocabulary of an earlier generation, whose theories Lévi-Strauss had set himself to overturn. Maybe, but if so it didn’t come off, and in ...”

“... less serious are disquisitions on such subjects as the Comic, which includes the observation that masters have essence but servants only existence – it’s a pity servants are going out of fashion, they were a useful dramatic resource (see ‘Balaam and His Ass’ in The Dyer’s Hand).These explanations can go on so long there isn’t always time to say ...”

“... He was certainly unhappy there – ‘highly strung, nervous and unsettled’, as one of his masters put it – and Thorpe alludes to the fact that he stood up for a younger boy suspected of sneaking about ‘moral matters’ – i.e. presumably blowing the gaff about homoerotic relationships. There was certainly more than a whiff of homophobia in the ...”

“... the society portraitist. Painted in 1786, it shows Polier at home with his friends Claude Martin, John Wombwell, the paymaster to the Company’s troops, and, in the background, with his head turned towards the viewer and painting another picture, Zoffany himself. Although Polier affects a long, drooping ‘Indian’ moustache and wears a turban, his ...”

“... birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the moralistic Beaverbrook) had a picture of the baby under the headline: ‘Who Is My Daddy?’ It was a feast, all the more so because ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... we learn the most from their personal memories, experiences, opinions. Do I claim to sit with the Masters? Yes, I do. His conflation of the historian’s mastery of ideas with an artist’s mastery of his craft is typical. But it would be a poor spirit who could mark the book down on rational analysis and ignore its proper virtues. If we can’t altogether ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... such as W.C. Wentworth, ‘the lord of the lash and triangle’, Benjamin ‘Flogger’ Boyd and John MacArthur – all of whom we meet with in the narrative – came to control the land, ‘filling it with blood and the suppuration of needless misery’. What keeps this spirit alive, according to Hall, is the complicity of the people, a people who ‘are ...”

“... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get anything by their Victory but new Masters.’ This, naturally, drew down thunderbolts of Sartrean abuse, which made permanent the breach between Camus and their author. Even now, Patrick McCarthy regards L’Homme Révolté as not merely Camus’s ‘worst book but one that did him great ...”

“... discharged. Perhaps this is why some of our writers, given the chance, become performing seals. John Malcolm Brinnin met Capote before his first novel was published and remained close to the novelist for many years,2 increasingly concerned about the extent to which his friend was cultivating his fame at the expense of his art. Brinnin had sponsored Dylan ...”