“... himself.’ Some of them pick up a ‘friend’ (a friendly term in itself) to take back home ‘to indulge in what we call the finer arts’ – ‘what they are I do not know,’ he says firmly. One gets the sense of these two constables as comparatively humane: daily inhabitants of a gay world whose codes they understand. They seem unlike the ...”

“... that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I didn’t want him gumshoeing around my children, my ex-mistresses, my everything,’ Cornwell said years later. ...”

“... When I go home to the Ayrshire town where I grew up, I’ve noticed in recent years that even the dowdiest and most traditional hotels, where the outer limits of exoticism used to be a round of tinned pineapple on top of a gammon steak, have embraced fusion cuisine. Multicultural eclecticism, from food to fashion, is the norm in today’s Britain, and not just in the big cities ...”

“... her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron. Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that deadly fever at Missolonghi. Having fought for Greek independence, he falls out of love with the ...”

“... about her having or spending lots of money. Yet she received visits from Lord Longford (she was a friend of his grandson) and Lord Hilton (‘a distant cousin of my mother’), and had a food hamper sent from Fortnum and Mason’s. On their last visit prior to her release, her parents arrived ...”

“... kami sa IOWA, pare ko,’ laughed one, and they clattered off over the Pacific. Prayer ‘Lord, Give me back my body And give me back my voice.’ ‘son, I would give your body back But alas I have no choice. ‘For you have pawned your arms and legs, Your fingers and your toes And you sold your voice to the bottle-boy For twenty-one pesos.’ ‘Oh ...”

“... of Agriculture, Secretary of State for the Dominions (Commonwealth Relations, as it became). Lord Privy Seal, Lord President of the Council, and leader of the House of Lords for the whole of the Attlee Government. This record is awesome enough and suggests a Third Republican capacity to accommodate and to please. He ...”

“... in 1099 had come to see the Holy Sepulchre and, having seen it, its members dispersed and went home. A rump remained behind to colonise the country and preserve the Sepulchre for future pilgrims. But it was a small rump, of undistinguished men. In Jerusalem, where every last man had been massacred on the Crusaders’ entry in 1099, the new Christian ...”

“... features fictional versions of two small men with big names: little H.G. Wells is one; little Lord Beaverbrook is the other. Beaverbrook is one of the surprises of this unfinished novel. The other surprise is Rebecca West herself. Sunflower is a book about falling in and out of love: it reveals that while West was having her much-publicised affair with ...”

“... my morning clinic as a GP there are a few tasks that I have to get done before heading out on home visits. The first is to check my inbox. There are always some messages from the government, public health alerts, emails from hospital consultants and district nurses with concerns about mutual patients, emails from the local medical school regarding ...”

“... Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him internationally famous, he found that the people of Northampton ...”

“... its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the sort of apron priests wore and so not appropriate for kings. This was a sure sign that he had got religion with a vengeance. Michal, one of his wives, ‘looked through a window, and saw King David ...”

“... What else is known against this great under-achiever? Anne Edwards tells us that he was a crony of Lord Arthur Somerset, who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all ...”

“... and another two hours later he would be pushing up towards Hampstead. He would not return home until the late afternoon. In his later years he went to a cinema with his wife Sarah two or three afternoons a week. Sarah usually took a bus home, while Bobby walked back unless it was raining. He disliked being ...”

“... The first three of the four chapters in Graham Hough’s book were the Lord Northcliffe Lectures in Literature given at University College London in February 1983. The audience was general and the lectures were pitched accordingly. Yet all Yeatsian specialists will profit from this book and the ‘radical simplification’ of Yeats’s occult philosophy which it so lucidly achieves ...”