“... consider was the inevitability of a clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism. Since Balfour and Lloyd George had had intimate experience of the clash of nationalisms and religions in Ireland, that was a pretty remarkable fit of absent-mindedness, particularly as they were warned by Curzon of the likely consequences of imposing heavy Jewish immigration on a ...”

“... one of O’Brian’s novels, Richard Temple (1962), Tolstoy deduces that Charles was an outspoken Lloyd George man, and that his son came to see him as being shamefully déclassé. Aubrey’s father, a Whig at a time when the Tories have the upper hand at the Admiralty, blights his career, and Tobias Barrow in The Unknown Shore (1959), a dry run for ...”

“... are not a ‘zombie nation’ (Martin Amis), an undifferentiated mass of ‘racist dwarfs’ (Christopher Hitchens), but 24 million individuals, as virtuous and vicious as the rest of us, and just as keen on sweet and sticky snacks. The Choco Pie story also reveals a susceptibility to outside influence in a society commonly regarded as impenetrable. For ...”

“... Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the excitements of the Cottage ...”

“... to set up Young Europe. Considering Mazzini’s ‘divergent legacies’ in England and in Italy, Christopher Duggan examines the paradoxical aspects of his long London exile. Giving away most of the money his mother sent him to other exiles, running a small charity school for poor Italian orphans, Mazzini could hardly help but seem a saint to London ...”

“... and equable style. He is charitable, just as he was in his earlier biographies of Selwyn Lloyd and Eden, both of whom had reasons to be resentful of Macmillan’s behaviour. By not taking sides, Thorpe leaves readers room to come to their own judgment. And if you want my guess here, I don’t think that Boothby, that insatiable seducer of both ...”

“... The crude conviction that theory was antithetical to research is captured in his remark that Christopher Hill – master of Balliol in Cobb’s time – was ‘not really MY sort of historian. He has IDEAS and he does not really like ARCHIVES.’ The hermeneutical bent of much Continental and American historical writing left him cold. ‘Soon,’ he ...”

“... he should allow himself the chance to state a principle, as well as having the wit to hint that Lloyd George is the last PM one can imagine having a fuck. At one point he invokes Callaghan in Cardiff on 4 June this year – ‘perhaps the last Labour Prime Minister’. Callaghan is offered an umbrella against the rain. ‘“Thank you, but no. I prefer to ...”

“... Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is registered for Mary ...”

“... Walton succeeded in writing an opera, indeed two. His arduous cross-Channel collaboration with Christopher Hassall on Troilus is documented more fully in the archives of La Mortella, the composer’s home, than it is here. In the end, and without consulting Hassall, Walton sought help from Auden, who was staying on Ischia. He contributed the Act Three ...”

“... years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is still ...”

“... 1940s the Utzons visited Greece and Morocco, drove a road-weary car around the US, visited Frank Lloyd Wright, Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe (who granted Utzon a minimalist interview, speaking, back turned, through a secretary) and then made for Mexico and the Aztec temples at Monte Alban in Oaxaca and Chichen Itza in Yucatan. These astonishing ruins stand ...”

“... she rang round suffrage societies trying at short notice to find a Welsh speaker who would flatter Lloyd George; she organised a fancy-dress march to Downing Street with representatives of all the suffrage groups (‘like trying to harness a pack of wild elephants – and wild elephants with years of private conflict behind them’). ‘If we get the vote ...”

“... of them (the Earl of Leicester being Elizabeth’s age – born either in 1532 or 1533 – Sir Christopher Hatton born c.1540, Ralegh himself in 1554, and the Earl of Essex in 1565), but they fall neatly into an older and younger generation. The turning point was 1587, for in that year Ralegh and Essex obtained their chief court offices, Captain of the ...”

“... in 2001, claims some credit too. ‘The whole thing has been sitting there,’ he told John Lloyd in a Financial Times interview in March 2006, ‘pretty fully tailored, waiting for someone to wear it.’ Hague, who’s now shadow foreign secretary, was also seen as a moderniser when he became leader, and is sometimes said to be Cameron’s deputy in ...”