“... national psychodrama, and that they tend to be a displacement activity. It echoes the loftiness of Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, with its whiff of paternalism; the ‘always’ implies the BBC’s permanence in the pantheon of British institutions.The BBC continues to rank alongside the NHS in the national imaginary, and is still the ...”

“... first novel. The tyranny of society in general is symbolised by the aristocratic monomaniac Lord Falkland, the good sense and misery of its common people by the aristocrat’s servant, the narrator, who spends much of the book in prison. ‘Thank God,’ exclaims the Englishman, ‘we have no Bastille! Thank God, with us no man can be punished without ...”

“... fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally ...”

“... But Sally is soon shocked to find she likes it, engaged though she may have become last night to Lord Holbeton, who has perfect manners, an outsize adam’s apple and a rather good tenor voice in which he sings ‘Trees’. Can we do without Lord Holbeton and thus save ourselves a few thousand words across the ...”

“... are those written to his contemporaries when he was a young man, particularly those to Brookfield, James Spedding, FitzGerald and Monckton Milnes; many of the others serve primarily to keep the records of his movements straight. Even when one understands the editors’ goal of completeness, it is hard to swallow the publication of a note to Patmore of which ...”

“... working-class vote. By the early 1880s, Forwood, the Conservative manager, was seeking to enlist Lord Randolph Churchill as a possible leader. Waller remarks of Tory Democracy: ‘The skilled seducers of “the uneducated” were not Radicals or politically-conscious working men ... but the traditional governing class.’ ...”

“... is to follow. These furthermore are ‘Cambridge histories’ in the classic sense, laid down by Lord Acton a century ago: general editors co-ordinate a series of chapters on related topics, each written by an authority in the field it defines. Academic culture today teems with multi-author volumes, many no more than the proceedings of particular ...”

“... With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous fascination’ with the detailed preparation. He caught the mood of the moment. ‘No one can measure the consequences,’ he recorded; ‘we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance ...”

“... receiving an alarmist report, the Council of State directed Sir Thomas Fairfax, the parliamentary lord general, to investigate, and he dispatched one of his officers to the scene. He reported back that not more than 20 people were involved in the digging: ‘The business is not worth the writing nor yet taking notice of.’ He described the man he thought to ...”

“... privilege of having proper and fruitful conversations with the Dame (Evelyn Sharp), the late Sir James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a ...”

“... the ‘infamous brute’ whom it was Wilde’s worst bit of luck to cross, also had it in for Lord Rosebery, who at the time of the Wilde libel action was Prime Minister. Queensberry had followed Rosebery to Homburg, stalking him with a dogwhip (presumably, says Pearson, because he didn’t happen to have a horse with him), and grievous bodily harm was ...”

“... to get home only by writing an even more eloquent begging letter to a passing English aristocrat, Lord Arlington. In Todd’s reading, furthermore, Behn is no more successful as a lover than as a spy. Her liaisons are presented as unappealing (Todd, alive to any suggestion of ill-health, is almost prepared to take literally Wycherley’s poem ‘To the Sappho ...”

“... and British Columbia. On the accession of Queen Victoria, he was nominated by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to a baronetcy as the representative man of letters at the same time as Herschel was nominated as the representative man of science. His attempts to attain a peerage were for many years frustrated by his wife, who behaved after their separation ...”

“... of the Times lead. The picture of Kingsley Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book ...”

“... had been cut off. It turned out to be a false economy on the Duke’s part. Yet to say, as James Laver did, introducing the 1929 edition, that there was ‘no creative impulse’ behind the Memoirs is quite untrue. Once she got going Harriette Wilson clearly wrote for the pleasure of writing. Many of the people she depicts are obscure; she simply ...”