“... 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 ...”

“... to keep such a book. But,’ he confided to an interviewer shortly after he was knighted, ‘a Lord Chief Justice told me he was perfectly certain that no judge would ever blame me.’ When he retired in 1909, he burned all his papers. Unlike such courtroom performers as Sir Edward Clarke, whose career took off after Lewis briefed him in the Staunton ...”

“... volumes will be better or worse, and are most unlikely to amount collectively to the seamless web Lord Acton dreamed about for the Cambridge Modern History. So, do we need a New Oxford History of England? The old one, got off the ground with great promptitude by G.N. Clark in the Thirties, held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume ...”

“... Indeed the curtsies might have been stopped the year before had it not been for John Grigg (then Lord Altrincham) whose sensational article in the National and English Review on the future of the monarchy had included a savage attack on debutantes and all they represented. The queen is thought to have kept the ceremony going for one more year just to show ...”

“... detected her ‘controlled hatred’ for it, while most of her fans regard her as supremely at home in it, using it as a vehicle for amusement and perception and something like comfortable fantasy. She repels and attracts; she can be attacked and defended. Nadine Gordimer, on the other hand, can only earn a chorus of dutiful praise. It must exasperate her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the outset his prerogative and the hierarchical nature of their relationship (the one a ‘lord’ and the other a ‘vassal’). ‘I am sorry to say it,’ he wrote, ‘but I have too often observed, that fear, as well as love, is necessary, on the lady’s part, to make wedlock happy.’ As he knew she would, Bradshaigh responded angrily. ‘Without ...”

“... it would … render them insolent to their superiors.’ One of the leading figures in government, Lord Eldon, who was lord chancellor almost without a break from 1801 to 1827, made himself, a contemporary historian wrote in 1828, ‘Licensor of the Press and Censor’. St Clair quotes Eldon in 1793, when he was only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”