“... 45 universities are attractive, efficient, and cheap. In 1978, they attracted 250,000 home and 40,000 overseas students. While Continental countries, notably France and Germany, make great efforts to attract students from overseas by subsidies and quotas, such students seem to come to Britain naturally, and despite all attempts at deterring ...”

“... had forgotten him and black militants were only just beginning to remember who he was. ‘Perhaps home,’ Baldwin’s narrator reflects in Giovanni’s Room, ‘is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’: where the heart is, but also where the heart festers and the mind rots. Slavery in America may be a grim ...”

“... Express. His book contains a certain amount of the old acid. Towards the end, he has a crack at Lord Carrington for allegedly being a snob. It is one of his many stories, told at second or third hand, that sometimes strain credulity. Carrington lived in the same London square as one Patrick Maitland, to whom, according to Junor, he never deigned to ...”

“... of the Cape were only too aware, Russia had its own designs on India. Indeed, in 1875 when Lord Carnarvon attempted to create a South African Confederation he justified his scheme by the need to defend British interests from Russian ambitions. In 1879 the British feared that Russia might take advantage of the Zulu War and strike in Central Asia – or ...”

“... life with keen attention to how events might have formed the future biographer.Boswell’s father, Lord Auchinleck, was a judge, and no more of a judge than when he cast an eye on his sons: ‘can I help it if my sons are idiots?’ he said from his deathbed; and this was the sort of thing he had said all his life, unloving to a horrible degree, and unspirited ...”

“... to health and public speaking. To judge from one of his surviving books, Byrd may have been at home in the barbarously archaic Norman-French of the Tudor law courts, which he certainly exploited with enthusiasm in perennial litigation, as any self-respecting Elizabethan gentleman would. It is symbolic of a certain insularity in Byrd that he owned this ...”

“... of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, and the official spokespeople of the agencies’ sponsoring departments, the Home Office and the FO.’ His own reputation for being relentless and immune to brush-offs led him to be seen, according to one irritated official, as ‘a long-term thorn in the side of the intelligence establishment’. But it also brought him respect where it ...”

“... Their belongings made a pile in the mud, a sad litter of cheap plastic combs, letters from home, empty wallets, matches and the occasional cigarette, a few coins. In the background, two Iraqis lay dead, one covered with a coat thrown over his head and shoulders, but the other bare under the rain, bleeding still from the holes to his chest and ...”

“... that several times Wharton was hampered by the standards imposed by periodicals like the Ladies’ Home Journal. There was a wide readership (and a good deal of money) available to writers for these magazines, but Edith’s stronger views and deeper knowledge had often to be camouflaged. One of the ‘gifts of chance’, as Shari Benstock clearly explains, was ...”

“... show in a furious email Black wrote to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I ...”

“... paid employment in the marketplace while their wives were to serve as angels of maternal virtue at home. As Wally Seccombe writes in Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (1993), this system (public man, private woman) spread in due course to the working classes, especially after schooling became ...”

“... In September 2010, the home secretary was warned that her plans to cut police funding could undermine their ability to deal with the tensions that would result from the government’s austerity package. ‘The British public,’ she replied, ‘don’t simply resort to violent unrest in the face of challenging economic circumstances ...”

“... In the devolution referendum of 1979 the Scottish people voted by a narrow margin for home rule, but not in sufficient numbers to meet the controversial threshold laid out in the Scotland Act – 40 per cent of the electorate. In the general election that followed after the SNP forced a vote of no confidence in the Labour government, the ...”

“... of dedications of exquisite lyrics to speck-like personages: ‘Terre Promise’ ‘For Herbert P. Home’, ‘Les Demoiselles de Sauve’ ‘To S.A.S. Alice, Princesse de Monaco’, ‘Mishka’ ‘To Henri Texeira de Mattos’ (the absence of Hallam from the title of In Memoriam looks even odder beside these scrupulously preserved gestures). In his ...”

“... at 14 and sailed before the mast to Melbourne and Calcutta, turned to typesetting when he came home, then lit out for the gold mines of British Columbia, before drifting into journalism and finishing up as managing editor of the San Francisco Times. In roaming the frontiers, he saw how land that was valueless yesterday could become worth many dollars an ...”