“... of appeal they would respond to. It was with this in mind that in December it set up a brand new Home Intelligence Department, within the fairly new Ministry of Information (or propaganda), to find out. It was headed by Mary Adams, one of British television’s earliest producers, before TV was shut down for the duration of the war: she moved to Whitehall ...”

“... his life after 1927, whether from discretion or from lack of materials is not made quite clear. Lord Trevelyan, a diplomatist, throws more light on Trevelyan and his family in ‘The Master’, an essay semi-humorous in tone, set among a cluster of sketches of various Trevelyans from successive epochs. The first part of ...”

“... about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his move to the US shortly before the outbreak of the ...”

“... to add its note to the judgment in the case of Colin Middleton. To defend the status quo as the Home Office did after the Middleton inquest was to reckon without the Human Rights Act, which was passed by Parliament in November 1998 and brought into law nearly two years later. In early 2004 Mrs Middleton finally got what she wanted: the law lords ruled that ...”

“... James Pope-Hennessy’s fatal passion for rough trade. I was taken aback when, later in the book, Lord Weidenfeld is rebuked for recounting events at which he wasn’t present. When John Richardson was present one often has to wonder why or how he got where he was. We find him ‘putting up’ at La Fiorentina – that’s ‘the famously fashionable villa at ...”

“... not fire creativity. Madness had made Kit Smart speak in tongues, shouting out vatic praise to the Lord in his ‘Jubilate Agno’. But derangement gave Cowper no flow of words, no jubilation, no pentecostal inspiration. Not for him the bohemian credo that only the purifying fire of acute mental and physical suffering can prove a poet’s mettle. Some of his ...”

“... poorer branch of a celebrated and wealthy family. His great-uncle was the fabulously rich press lord, Lord Beaverbrook, who told his great-nephew that he was able enough to make his own way in politics without the burden of a huge inheritance. Young Jonathan did not go along with this avuncular assessment. Political ...”

“... and kept my hatred of the race to myself.’ But he did make two friends, one of whom wrote home: ‘He is the cleverest chap in the school ... not a bit conceited ... a simply topping chap.’ He left school ‘amazingly ignorant of the world’. He wrote: ‘Cambridge was a liberation. All the richness of thought was open to me ... I could meet for ...”

“... 1718 showed them making things up as they went along, and claiming to be new incarnations of the Lord of Heaven, or even of the Holy Spirit. Another intriguing episode, and one with the argument about language at its root, is the suicide in 1628 of Nicolas Trigault. The affair was hushed up, and indeed goes unmentioned in Trigault’s entry in a standard ...”

“... Smooth Jacob, not tough, hairy Esau, got the spiritual inheritance and took the place that the Lord had reserved for him among the Fathers of Israel, such being the ways of the Lord in the Middle East. Barbara reflected that God had not been to Eton. Jacob would have made a marvellous Jesuit.Muriel Spark’s interest in ...”

“... A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers ...”

“... The argument and controversy about the Jewish presence in Ireland which ensued in these years when Home Rule seemed a serious possibility were essentially about Ireland itself, about whether the new society should become closed and Catholic and conservative. It is not a coincidence that the riots in the Abbey Theatre about the portrayal of Irish womanhood in ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... the project of his great history of liberty, his ‘Madonna of the Future’, as he called it, Lord Acton was courting nemesis. For ‘moonlight’ his detractors have tended to read ‘moonshine’. His defenders have countered the impression that he wrote no history by representing that in fact he wrote a good deal; but they are heavily dependent on his ...”

“... she reciprocated by sending him Flower’s love-letters to read. ‘You must marry,’ advised Lord Dufferin, ‘but you must never marry because but in spite of being in love. You are far too clever, my dear Margot, not to be helping some man.’ Margot had recently met Asquith, who was already married to a homebody who ‘lives in Hampstead, and has no ...”