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“... pattern of migration. Are the motives of a teenager off to apprenticeship two counties away from home in any way similar to those of an adult craftsman making himself available for sale as indentured labour on the other side of the Atlantic? We know that in Early Modern British society almost every young person left ...”

“... rooted’. He says: ‘It is as if Damien Hirst had arrived at Blandings Castle and pickled Lord Emsworth’s prize pig in formaldehyde.’ Or, I would suggest, it is as if Ben Travers, having brushed up on Grand Guignol, had given one of his Aldwych silly asses a profile of Adonisian beauty, triumphantly displayed until eventually the head is turned to ...”

“... in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’ It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all. The amalgamation was an economic policy; the British ...”

“... and woefully insufficient victuals. For all the excitement of Porto Bello in 1739 (made much of at home precisely because showy naval victories were still rare), subsequent events revealed the navy’s inability to cope with the medical and logistical challenges of protracted operations in the Caribbean. And then there were individual inadequacies. Rodger ...”

“... no matter that Annie was living in Antigua and Kincaid in New York. She had been sent away from home at sixteen to work as an au pair. To punish her family, she refused to send money back. She got a full scholarship but dropped out of college to write. She found an apartment on West 22nd Street, sleeping first on newspapers then on a mattress she found on ...”

“... spite of their neat little houses, of no fixed address, except in the sense of heaven being their home. The only thing he describes which is new to me is the practice of reading somebody out of the assembly for fornication. (‘Excommunicating’ would be one more forbidden word.) Whether this means that my brethren were more lethargic about committing and ...”

“... the noise of the train as it makes its way from Moscow to Petushki (Yerofeev’s horrible little home town) calling at Hammer and Sickle, Chukhlinka, Reutovo, Kuchino, Zheleznodorozhnaya, and all stations beyond except Yesino.Yerofeev’s father, appropriately enough, was a stationmaster at Poyakonda in the far North, who, in the purge year of 1938, when his ...”

“... but he was also an English gentleman in an ahistorical sense. He would have been perfectly at home with Warren Hastings, or with any of the grandees of the East India company. In his house there were two great kitchens, one for the preparation of local dishes under a Bengali thakur, one for Western food produced by a Muslim chef who had trained in ...”

“... by royal command. These may be ranked as small imprudences, however, and when they are set beside Lord Randolph Churchill’s relationship with Lord Rothschild no decline in standards is discernible. If ‘corruption’ is used in the narrow sense to denote the impingement of private interests on public decisions, even Dr ...”

“... that the real issue was the ownership of land. In 1893 he canvassed against Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill on the grounds that it would exacerbate the question of land and cause war between landowner and peasant. In Paris he joined Yeats and Maud Gonne in the Association Irlandaise and stayed in it as long as its talk sounded harmless, but when Maud’s ...”

“... notion of a luxury is limited, and they tend to say that they would like a bottle of champagne (Lord Dacre insisted on a crate) or of perfume, or they would prefer to have writing materials or a radio powered by the sun. Only a few avoid these obvious choices. If memory serves, Sir Thomas Beecham wanted a revolver, Arthur Scargill chose the Mona Lisa, a ...”

“... spell each day as they circled the exercise yard.De Profundis, a 55,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, written by Wilde during the final months of his two-year sentence, is a strange literary creation, a hybrid text. It was the only work he produced while in jail. On 4 April 1897 the prison governor informed the Prison Commission that each ...”

“... again because his paperwork didn’t measure up – while also losing his job and his home. He was left on the street. As it turns out, the one source of evidence that might have put a stop to this torture – the landing cards that recorded arrivals from the Caribbean until the 1960s – was destroyed by the ...”

“... and others against the Spectator. (The magazine had reported him drunk in Venice: the late Lord Goddard had a bias against the press; and years later I remember Crossman, again in the ghastly Bung Hole, cheerfully admitting that he had been as drunk as – what? Not a lord, perhaps. A skunk?) These sorts of shifting ...”

“... what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking what it’s worth, in cash terms. Lord Emsworth didn’t worry what his pig was worth. Gussie Fink-Nottle and Ken Livingstone love their newts for themselves, not for their market value. P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration, 1881-1981 is also lumbered with a bibliography, which takes up half ...”