“... ten years. This peace is Shand’s great diplomatic achievement, a preparation for his new role as lord of the as yet undeveloped Docklands, and partner of a sinister American figure played by Eddie Constantine – better known as the incarnation of Lemmy Caution (in a series of French thrillers and in Godard’s Alphaville). There is a wonderful image here of ...”

“... of an earlier era and from the Gradgrinds of the new industries. On one side of them were Lord Melbourne’s successors, with their liking for a Garter which had ‘no damned merit’ about it: on the other Mr Scrooge. They had no inhibitions about proclaiming their altruism and the way in which they had acquired their sterling characters by steady ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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.’ ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is still two years away. It’s Liberty Hall on the London streets in 1860. They walk down to St James’s. Nothing. Normally Caroline’s had her nancy jiggled two or three times by now. Reeling out of the Minor Club come a couple of swells. ‘Why,’ says Caroline, loud enough to be heard in Green Park, ‘if it ain’t Captain Flashie, VD – I mean ...”

“... their path; Walpole’s homegrown example for this sort of ‘accidental sagacity’ was ‘of my Lord Shaftesbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table’. Walpole’s new word did not ...”

“... else: a pseudo-monarchy, with government shared by a ‘single person’ – Oliver Cromwell, lord protector – and Parliament. Cromwell was backed by a written constitution, the work of another soldier, John Lambert, which focused on moderate franchise reform, checks and balances, and a certain degree of religious toleration. It was inaugurated in a ...”