“... who left as lasting a stamp on the political landscape as Peel, Joseph Chamberlain or Lloyd George. Lord Blake treads warily. Indeed, one of the disappointments of the later, added chapters is that he feels obliged to be indiscriminately polite to anyone not yet quite dead. Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint. His tribute to the organisational genius of ...”

“... it possible for MPs to become ministers. This sounds like a minor wrinkle, but as the essays by Michael Gordon and by Rose Melikan show, it had a significant effect on our constitutional principles. An emerging principle of ministerial exclusion was turned on its head and eventually became our notion of ministerial responsibility. Instead of the legislature ...”

“... thought him a fool, and this assumption prevented other artists from profiting by his example. George Eliot remembered Piero’s eggs and reclusive habits in Romola, improving the story yet again: why she has the eggs delivered ready-boiled is a question for Victorianists. Vasari had got on to something important when he perceived that the lives of ...”

“... sort of poetry that Fenton writes, and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and ...”

“... government would have handled the Falklands crisis with greater skill and to greater effect. Michael Foot speaks in the tones of Churchill in the Second World War and of Lloyd George in the First. It is fair to say that these two statesmen have often been numbered among Michael’s ...”

“... Deborah Nadoolman Landis, is herself a celebrated Hollywood designer (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and now a professor of design history at UCLA; the show consists of some pieces of her own, and many others from Debbie Reynolds’s collection, recently sold – she had pioneered salvaging costumes from studio wardrobes. Landis has ...”

“... to think of presidents like Ronald Reagan and – not that anyone wants to remember this now – George W. Bush inheriting the mantle of Winston Churchill. Robert Conquest, presenting a relatively sophisticated, unmilitaristic and tolerant version of the Anglosphere (it included Nigeria and India) in Reflections on a Ravaged Century contrasted ‘the ...”

“... to the rakish, ‘gay dog’ critic. Keynes also mortified Woolf by telling her that her memoir of George Duckworth, later published as 22 Hyde Park Gate, was the best thing she had ever done. He advised her bluffly to carry on in that vein, ‘write about real people & make it all up’, causing her to reflect that ‘if ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... laughed at another friend’s ‘ridiculous confusion’ when he lost his luggage, and he said of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes: ‘They really are the ugliest couple in London.’ When that same Lewes contributed a series of articles on the theme of ‘Success in Literature’, Dickens was heard to say: ‘Success in ...”

“... biographies has toppled several notable royal icons from their pedestals. Kenneth Rose depicted George V as an ogre so boorish and philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of ...”

“... British imperial superiors, even – Scott Anderson suggests – to the point of treason. (When George V tried to decorate him after the war, he handed all the medals back on the spot.) He was also very much against European cultural imperialism, genuinely – so far as we can tell – preferring ‘Eastern’ ways. (Certain Eastern ways, that is: he had a ...”

“... the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them ...”

“... that the secretary of the committee which planned it was the British MI6 officer and Russian spy, George Blake, who passed details of the entire operation to the Russians two years before the tunnel was completed. Here, too, is the story of MI6’s courageous decision to order Commander Lionel Crabb to swim under a Russian warship in Portsmouth to take ...”

“... inarticulate resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world of George Brown, Ray Gunter and Robert Mellish – those Labour dinosaurs who used to invoke the common man but who, while envying the Tories their vowels and their ease of manner, would turn into RSMs when confronted with party dissidents like Bertrand Russell or ...”