“... or the sexual health of the nation might suffer accordingly. Goodbye.’ 15 January. We now have a home secretary who, on being told one of the prisoners in his care has committed suicide, says he feels like pouring himself a drink. This is a statement deplorable on so many levels they’re too wearying to list. But it will delight the Sun and the Daily Mail ...”

“... another of her lovers on some moody sapphic verses –The lustful lungings of the massesTrundling home perambulators,Striving to increase the nation –Indiscriminate copulators.is a representative sample – ‘Joe’ was to remain all her life a creature of action and not words.Following the Armistice and a stint driving lorries for the British forces in ...”

“... be much future in a religion that changed bread and ginger ale into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. One of the purposes of literature, as Joyce made clear, is to put religion in its place. Joyce’s​ finding Catholic ritual amusing and Woolf’s contempt for Christians are easy to follow and fathom. Having rejected religious faith, they got ...”

“... of Northumberland. Andrew’s mother, Lady Catherine, born in 1781 in Dresden, was the daughter of Lord Claverton, who had retired to Redmond Manor (now the property of an Arab magnate), some seventy miles from Marbot Hall, after a lifetime spent in the diplomatic service in Germany, the Low Countries and Italy. The main influence on the boy came from the ...”

“... poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each time to seem more important to the status and success of ...”

“... that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William Jackson, GBE KCB MC MA, and Field Marshal Lord Bramall KG GCB OBE MC JP (JP indeed!). No artillery comes heavier than that. The title is also a little misleading: our generals tell the story, not just of ‘the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff’, as they claim, but of higher defence organisation as a ...”

“... and in peril in an increasingly Whig and Protestant state. There is the case of the future Lord Baltimore and the daughter of Lord Lichfield in Broken Lives, ‘a Catholic marriage on both sides’ and, in Uncertain Unions, the premarital struggles of the daughter of the Tory, possibly Jacobite, 2nd Duke of ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... friendships and embarrassing the ex-pats. Her language was such that when she dined with Lord Exmouth, admiral of the English fleet at Tunis, he sent his midshipman out of the room. As time went by she acquired a ‘family’ of adopted children and several relatives of her handsome Italian manservant, Pergami, who was widely assumed to be her ...”

“... for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated.The trustees of Lord Portsmouth are mentioned in the centenary brochure as subscribing to the cathedral fund. The following sentence is added: ‘Later, in the famine years, this family, which practically owned Enniscorthy, did nothing to aid their people.’ In my father’s ...”

“... 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the Companions.3 And 3. Lord Longford, from his Diary of a Year4 – the year 1981. Each of these books makes much of its own modesty, of its willingness to expose its author’s true and warty face, and there has been a certain interest in comparing the three distinct styles of ...”

“... son (who later committed suicide). Restored to calm, I walk across St James’s Park, beneath Lord Nelson and up the Strand to Covent Garden. Robin has not slept either. Business, however, is good, and continues so for the rest of the day. A small independent publisher delivers an order personally. One of his eyes squints, but he is enormously ...”

“... reason with an issue that cries out for long-term thought. A veteran Conservative stalwart, Lord Hodgson, has been appointed to conduct a review of the 2006 Charities Act, and he is on record as having announced that ‘nothing is ruled in, and nothing is ruled out.’ But it requires no supernatural gift of prophecy to predict that the opportunity ...”

“... in Russia are no concern of ours. We only consider them in so far as they affect the war.’ Lord Curzon’s assurances to Bruce Lockhart, the British political agent in Russia, in February 1918 already had a hollow ring when they were written. The War Cabinet could not face the inevitability of an Eastern peace or the reality of the Bolshevik ...”

“... horns sent signals across dark forests; they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch in Lord of the Flies; they sounded a challenge on the battlefield. And this is where young Roland’s ‘slug-horn’ finds its place. As the hero’s ‘slogan’ it is, as it were, the ‘mott’ – both ‘fanfare’ and ‘saying’ – through which he ...”