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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a barrister, a friend of prime ministers, archbishops and high officials, a former client of Lord Goodman, could ever be found guilty of conspiring to murder a homosexual male model of lower-middle class background and doubtful record.’ The details of such truly grotesque events are easily forgotten. Thorpe and the others were accused of conspiring to ...”

“... the missile. General Pile’s plan is discussed by that alert and indefatigable chronicler of the Home Front, Norman Longmate, in Hitler’s Rockets, a sequel to The Doodlebugs. The General admitted that the difficulties were prodigious. For one thing, the rockets came in on erratic courses, with a target accuracy of plus or minus several miles. Existing ...”

“... the son thrives rather than starves in foreign parts. It further supposes that when he returns home, his father does not immediately recognise him as he runs to meet him and shower him with gifts. Instead, blinded by cupidity, the father sees only a wealthy stranger ripe for the picking. He murders his son, and only later discovers what he has done: he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... figure in the pantheon of Tory leaders? What is best known about him is that he is ‘unknown’. Lord Blake’s celebrated biography, The Unknown Prime Minister (1955), took its cue from Asquith’s perhaps apocryphal remark at Bonar Law’s funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1923: it was fitting, Asquith said, to ‘have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by ...”

“... documentary ‘Dear Bill’ letters, or you can despair, gnash your teeth and rail against the Lord for culpable laziness when he got round to inventing humankind. He was, perhaps, boiling an egg at the time. I’m inclined towards teeth-gnashing, but aspire to being a more balanced person, so I alternated reading the Denis Thatcher story with a rereading ...”

“... moralistic William Haley, the rather prissy William Rees-Mogg, or the crusading Charles Douglas-Home. Paul Dacre, on the other hand, isn’t just ‘rather different’ from these three. He is entirely different, belonging to a category of journalism quite distinct from theirs. Not only is it tabloid in the sense of being aimed at a mass readership: it is ...”