“... the dirty work, or one who had been killed in a Christian cause. An example of the first kind is Edward the Confessor; of the second, Edmund, murdered by Vikings in 869 for refusing to give up Christianity. This demarcation between sainthood and active kingship was one way in which society tried to uphold high moral ideals in an immoral world. Clergy were ...”

“... is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting obedient attention from each new generation of students, but this form of academic perpetuity does not extend to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular ...”

“... It’s a strange thing,’ said Harold Macmillan after becoming Prime Minister, ‘that I have now got the biggest job I ever had, and less help in doing it than I have ever known.’ He referred, of course, to the absence of any significant department for the Prime Minister – the ‘hole in the centre of the system’, as Lord Hunt put it ...”

“... Fédération des Industries du Vêtement Masculin. His ‘accessible’ (i.e. readable) text is said by the publishers to lay before us ‘the entire fabric of the intellectual, spiritual and material forces of the modern age’, which is pitching it a bit strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his ...”

“... to get out of the building. Barbara suggested it might be an earthquake but Mary disagreed and said that the boys were ‘overreacting’: it was only a ‘tremor’. So they went on with their chicken curry and its accompaniment of cucumbers, tomatoes and nuts. As a split opened down the wall, Hosking ‘felt a strange sensation, rather like standing on a ...”

“... view is that it was Robert ‘who distanced himself from us.’ No doubt there are things to be said on both sides. Perhaps Robert does protest too much: Once I’d left the Army, no one ever rang me up to see how I was, or to ask me whether they could help me with my career, as they’d always suggested they would do as ‘the family’. They never asked ...”

“... to worry – I’d pay him special attention so at least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty ...”

“... what changes it has undergone in what conditions; what merits the alternative position might be said to have. Against the dalliance of this endless statement and qualification, this circumnavigation of every thought by other, rugged little thoughts, is set the grim forward march of Ahab’s will, or, as Ishmael says, his ‘intense bigotry of ...”

“... back into a state that I thought we should be able to make it pay within a year or two,’ she said at her trial. The labour force was small by local standards (even so, in 1934 the Selwyns employed at least 11 men, including a cook and houseboy, two of them Suk – there were no female servants). Coffee was added to the staple of maize and there were some ...”

“... rooted as they were in a dour nonconformity. I once met the Warton Professor-elect and he said two things that struck me as funny but interestingly contradictory. One was that people had been complaining that his books were getting shorter and shorter – he had recently taken on The Function of Criticism from Addison to the present in a hundred and ...”

“... with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ By these and other measures, the American love affair with science has become even more ardent over recent ...”

“... Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor of Bexhill who promoted the pavilion. It was, he said, ‘a venture which is part of a great national movement, virtually to found a new industry – the industry of giving that relaxation, that pleasure, that culture, which hitherto the gloom and dreariness of British resorts have driven our fellow countrymen ...”

“... in the press as the inventor of ‘zigzag writing’ after a remark in the introductory note by Edward Johnston, a founding father of modern calligraphy. Richardson’s ideas were ‘child-centred’ but she wasn’t a pushover. Pupils who forgot their paintbox were sent to sit in the garden (‘you can go to the devil for all I care’). Hensher loves her ...”

“... just as hundreds of simple-lifers at the turn of the last century trekked to Millthorpe to call on Edward Carpenter, whose ‘wholesome’ dinners involved only oatmeal, an egg, some cheese and a little fruit. Carpenter, a romantic socialist and determined breaker of conventions, threw away his dress clothes, wore sandals, lived off his smallholding, sunbathed ...”

“... hospital, which is, I think, what that Celtic-Rangers poem was about, the final joke he made. He said he’d turn blue – the Glasgow Rangers team colour – by the morning. Which he did; he didn’t last the night. That was upsetting for a 13-year-old lad, and then it became much more upsetting in my twenties when I began to think more about him and what ...”