“... any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their ...”

“... or in a place – is the problem. Like Crossing the Mangrove, it begins shortly after a death. A young Black man, Dieudonné, has just been acquitted of murdering a white Creole, Lorraine. He owes the victory to his lawyer’s speechifying: ‘The cruel békée mistress. The defenceless slave. The mistress humiliates and wields the whip. One day, the slave ...”

“... A man of deep culture and reading in many languages, Edward Luttwak has at least three major personae – strategist, journalist and scholar. His practical experience of contemporary policy and defence is reinforced by an almost professional knowledge of military history, particularly in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and he expounds his views in lively prose that gives maximum exposure to the most eccentric of them ...”

“... Savile Row façade was festooned to celebrate the state visit of Napoleon III and the wedding of Edward VII, both Poole men. In The Suit, Christopher Breward writes of the tailor’s ‘crucial ritual’ of measuring the client, a practice he believes has been overlooked because of its ‘intensely personal nature’. ‘Customers seem not to have patience ...”

“... occasional treats to be nabbed, such as the two boxes of marmalade that washed ashore on Sir Edward Mansell’s land in 1583, or the 43 pipes of wine that John Poulson fished out of the Erme estuary in 1630. Canny landowners could do good business out of dangerous stretches of coast. Sir Nicholas Lestrange kept a list of ‘Wreck goods bought’ and ...”

“... from the actual writing of history. Dr de Ste Croix spares nobody – not Eric Hobsbawm or Edward Thompson. But what he writes about theory is worth paying attention to, since, like Hobsbawm and Thompson, he has produced first-class history himself. His book should also stimulate ancient historians, who one hopes will be no more set in their ways than ...”

“... Berkhamsted, and his father, its headmaster, was sufficiently astonished by this action to put the young Graham into the hands of a psychotherapist, who required him to make regular notes of his dreams so they could be discussed during daily sessions. While this took place Greene was removed from the hated school. Psychotherapy proved to be a wonderful ...”

“... that they should remember their birthdays. In Scott of the Antarctic Elspeth Huxley noted that Dr Edward Wilson’s 39th occurred during a side-trip to study the emperor penguins: ‘quite the funniest birthday I have ever spent’. In the novel, when Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans mentions his birthday in an attempt at emotional blackmail, Scott dismisses ...”

“... Every word is recorded. Grant skilfully shows how modes of speech capture attitudes. He quotes Sir Edward Marshall Hall QC, ‘doyen of criminal advocates, in the defence of Madame Fahmy, on trial in 1923 for the murder of her Egyptian husband in the Savoy hotel’: She discovered for the first time that he had not only the vilest of vile tempers, but was ...”

“... the settled bourgeoisie; Charlie Chaplin placed his almost diagonally across the top of his head; Edward, Prince of Wales angled his upward, seeming to signify the slippery slope between masculine grace and sexual predation; the sluggers of Bandits’ Roost in New York City tilted their crowns downward almost to eye-level. The fedora, which, at least in the ...”

“... both attracted to and suspicious of her, Robert is an ‘indolent, handsome and indifferent’ young barrister who spends his time lounging around reading French novels. When George Talboys returns from Australia with a fortune, determined to lay it at the feet of the wife he deserted three years before, and then mysteriously disappears, Robert is shaken ...”

“... of champagne, even on the high Amazon. The jacket of Travels with a Superior Person shows the young Curzon, resembling a more soigné young Churchill, standing proprietorially before the Pyramids. This is the man who postponed marriage to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a ...”

“... It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.Boswell was plagued by venereal disease and thought his bouts were worse because ‘I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison ...”

“... café I cared for. There were undergraduates I knew at whom Auden made passes, though I was still young and innocent enough to find a pass as remarkable as the person making it.When he died in 1973 his death seemed to me less a loss to poetry – the poetry was largely over – than a loss to knowledge. Auden was a library in himself and now all this store ...”

“... but sure, to the Widow Bull’s victualling house in Deptford, where in spring 1593 four young men spent a day drinking wine in the garden. Mrs Bull’s house was not a tavern, nor was she a sort of Mistress Quickly, half-expecting a fight to break out as the sun declined. She was a bailiff’s widow, with some court connections; her house was a ...”