“... was that secrecy inevitably gave rise to corruption – ‘every thing secret degenerates,’ Lord Acton wrote. It was a ‘foreign’ trait, and in the form of covert surveillance, it was also believed to be counterproductive. Spying was supposed to sniff out unstable social elements, but stability depends on trust, and if people thought they were being ...”

“... everything in new Waitrose carrier bags, one bag inside another in case one split on the way home. They brought them over and put them on the floor alongside her Sainsbury’s bag. I wasn’t allowed to speak to her, but I sneaked a look at her voucher, and in the section headed ‘nature of crisis’, ‘benefit delays’ had been ticked. I could see ...”

“... the urban poor, and most of those 41 arrested women were sex workers. But even women who stayed at home had to guard against attacks on their respectability. In July 1747, two women brought their neighbour to court for violating their honour. The neighbour, they claimed, had stood at their door the previous night, yelling profanities and calling one of them a ...”

“... lonely, miserable, embittered failure’; Harold and his wife were ‘marginal people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of Aristocracy, show that, for all his gifts, he would not be a front-runner for the editorship of Country Life. Few historians ...”

“... the ‘glorious’ first of June that Nelson damned as an ‘Earl Howe victory’, sent the noble lord himself scuttling back to England for a literally royal reception, while the huge convoy that he had been sent out to intercept made its slow and peaceful way into Brest. The British were driven out of the Low Countries and the émigré force they put ashore ...”

“... Solicitor-General, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, leader of two ‘missions’ to India, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, Minister of Aircraft Production, President of the Board of Trade, Minister of Economic Affairs, Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1942 he was seriously spoken of as successor to Churchill were Churchill’s luck ...”

“... ink drawings, a rebel leader makes himself comfortable in the abbot’s seat like a self-appointed lord of misrule, while the monks flee to Ravensburg with whatever they can carry. Beneath this mayhem lay epicurean delight. ‘It must have been sensational to enter these enclosed communities,’ Roper suggests, ‘to find their warm heating ovens, feather ...”

“... voters to react in a particular way to political issues. In 1841, Jews were encouraged to vote for Lord John Russell (a Whig) because he was in favour of Jewish Emancipation – he won by nine votes. The Jewish vote, clearly, could be mobilised and put to good use. The Liberals put up five Jewish candidates at the next election, including David Salomons (who ...”

“... fireOr the starbeams dart through them –Gertrude Stein once memorably remarked of her childhood home of Oakland, California, ‘There is no there there,’ a phrase which seems to me coincidentally to capture what Shelley does in some of his very best poems, and suggests the ways in which he is unlike most of his Romantic contemporaries, who were in one way ...”

“... volumes reached their climaxes with the deaths of Boswell’s father and of Johnson respectively. Lord Kames, another great man whose biography Boswell was planning to write, died near the beginning of the last volume, so that it has the additional imposed symmetry of beginning and ending with the death of a potential biographee: that volume closes with the ...”

“... an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Cult of Lord Byron, confirmed the allure of the poet’s ‘life and legend’. Everyone seems to agree that the making of a celebrity (somewhere he must have been called a ‘cultural icon’) is fascinating enough in itself. Never has a dead poet lived on so ...”

“... A beautiful young woman, Isabel Archer, is pursued by three suitors: the dashing, reliable Lord Warburton; the dashing, demonic Gilbert Osmond; and a relentless, even fanatical American industrialist who is called not Boldwood, but Caspar Goodwood. James accused Hardy of having ‘little sense of proportion and almost none of composition’, but it can ...”

“... allowed her to become fluent in French, German and Italian. In 1908 she joined the Society of Home Students in Oxford, where her father was a chaplain, and read for the Honours History School, specialising in the Renaissance. While women were not yet allowed to matriculate, she did well in finals, albeit not as well as her tutors felt she might have done ...”

“... promoted by a British education and the experiences of African students both in Britain and at home.By the end of the 19th century, African students were arriving in modest numbers and had begun to organise around shared concerns. This generation is less well known than its 20th-century successors, but it included A.B.C. Merriman-Labor of Sierra Leone, who ...”

“... intervals firmly clasped in an Establishment embrace. Fifty or sixty years ago there would be a Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall, a reception given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, grand dinners in great houses, even a Royal Garden Party. Of course, nowadays the home church hosts – the ...”