“... in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church in the afternoon is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and unexpectedly rounded off by Ben, her middle son, who despite grief and nerves manages to say what his mother had meant to him and his two ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... Ricketts was medical superintendent of the Smallpox Hospitals and River Ambulance Service of the Metropolitan Asylums Board. The haemorrhagic rash matures on the tenth day; death occurs about this time. A quarter of a century has gone by since the last natural case of smallpox anywhere in the world. Ali Maow Maalin, a cook at the hospital in ...”

“... not devolve to autonomous agencies. Many services, indeed, might stand to gain, since the Civil Service has (or had) responsibilities that could best be discharged by others. But the configuration of such agencies has to be tightly drawn and the lines of accountability clearly understood; and in practice, as he notes, many of the quangos are not accountable ...”

“... in Bowler’s book demonstrates how strongly biological theory could be pressed into political service. This was not solely a 19th-century phenomenon. When the notions of racial hierarchy and lineal development were replaced in the 1920s by a Darwinian branching tree, a new generation took this as a further legitimation of their imperial demands: the ...”

“... literary event. Indeed, it was a literary event in a good many different, though related ways. As Robert Darnton has emphasised, it was a literary event in that it unlocked the printing presses and called forth a torrent of newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and essays. Where France possessed no uncensored newspapers before 1789, almost two hundred journals ...”

“... trying to steal apples; standing rapt before a fruit stall, gazing at ripe pears. Today it’s Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia rice. Finally they steal a child, blond-haired, not quite three. One of them takes him by the hand. They lead him into the city. They walk some busy roads, they are seen ...”

“... the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re ...”

“... to have existed. From the Eighties of the last century right through until the post-WWII National Service years widened the intake, raised the age and lowered the voice of undergraduates, the Footlights was concerned almost exclusively with make-up and drag. Faced with this fact, which the photographs and song-sheets would not have allowed him to shirk even ...”

“... Princess Elizabeth should have become No 230873 Second Subaltern in the Auxiliary Transport Service, driving a heavy vehicle through rush-hour traffic and servicing it as necessary. After the war, Prince Philip comes prominently into the picture. Lady Longford vouches for the fact that he proposed to the Princess and not she to him, and one can believe ...”

“... contradictions of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her dislike of ...”

“... Labour prime minister. MacDonald was elected chairman and leader, as the press at the time, and Robert Mackenzie much later, stressed. MacDonald had the charisma, he had the contacts with the Left, and he profited from the general disenchantment with the war and those associated with it. That said, it is impossible to see the worthy Clynes as a ‘lost ...”

“... great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are ...”

“... he staged his paintings. ‘We were surprised to learn that his suicide was so ritualistic,’ Robert Motherwell said. For me, and I imagine for many others then as now, Rothko just was his paintings – paintings that seemed, when we stood before them spellbound, to be our shifting moods themselves. It is with some trepidation that one opens a new ...”