“... an exemplary job of demolition, made all the more convincing by his generous willingness to regard Lord Longford as something better than a buffoon. Commendably ready to hold an opinion no matter who agrees with him, Levin finds himself siding with Lord Longford over the matter of Myra Hindley. ‘In this matter,’ he ...”

“... dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the Immortal Seven who in 1688 invited William of Orange to rescue England from popery and arbitrary rule. William, Lord Russell, the heir of the 5th earl of Bedford, was executed in 1683 for his ...”

“... is going to enjoy being told in this way about the misdeeds of his subordinates. In writing to Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and hence his ultimate master in London, the Governor does his best to swallow his irritation. Routledge had indeed been to see him, bringing with him the statements referred to in his letter. ‘He was ...”

“... hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to the stay-at-home theorisers.’ This is fighting talk, but The Lion and the Springbok soon subsides into a conventional but illuminating archival study, aimed above all at showing that British policy towards South Africa was guided by more than mere economic concerns, and ...”

“... 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 ...”