“... abroad in this period were often put down to the fact that it was also exceptionally fortunate at home. Fortunate, it was believed, because – in the midst of European absolutism – the Glorious Revolution had bestowed upon it, and it alone, sound parliamentary government, religious toleration, and an end to dynastic conflict. Fortunate, too, in that its ...”

“... Bevan, who was to become his friend and mentor for the next 20 years. Bevan introduced him to Lord Beaverbrook, thereby cementing one of several unlikely alliances that characterised Foot’s long life. He later said of Beaverbrook: ‘I loved him, not merely as a friend, but as a second father.’ Beaverbrook, though in most respects a reactionary ...”

“... Dominic​ Raab is the eighth lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice since the Conservative Party entered government in 2010. The average tenure has been nineteen months, with a corresponding churn of junior ministers and special advisers. Kenneth Clarke, the first in the post, lasted 28 months, just pipped by Chris Grayling, whose disastrous term was the longest at 32 months ...”

“... Bradbury and Ruland seem to expect a woman who has just witnessed the destruction of her home, the murder of friends and relatives, the death of one child and abduction of another, to behave like a cross between Margaret Mead and David Attenborough. It is quite untrue to suggest that she averted her eyes from the realities of the ...”

“... of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris outside St Clement Danes. The interesting peer of the realm Lord Ashcroft KCMG wrote about the unveiling on his website conservativehome: ‘I was privileged enough to share that special moment … as a guest of the Bomber Command Association. As one of the principal donors of the appeal for the new memorial – I gave ...”

“... health but it isn’t certain whether Split was always intended to be a spectacular retirement home or conceived as an imperial palace, its ritual spaces there to serve the cult of the emperor as god. It was these spaces and their potential which Adam took back to Britain along with his notes and drawings. He coined the Spalatro Order, an adaptation of an ...”

“... cent holding in these Beaverbrook papers, he owns more than the present wielder of power there, Lord Matthews – the tycoon admirer of Mrs Thatcher – from Trafalgar Holdings. In yet another sortie into the Fleet Holdings battle Swiss bankers are believed to be buying shares eagerly – and again, they are buying them for unknown clients. Another salient ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... of all kinds. He attacked his mother’s prime ministers for their sartorial shortcomings: Lord Rosebery was rebuked for dressing like an American and Lord Salisbury for attending the queen wearing the trousers of an Elder Brother of Trinity House (Salisbury had to apologise: he had been preoccupied by ‘some ...”

“... he resembled a prosperous small businessman who liked to remind people he had served a term as lord mayor. He talked too much, a failing exacerbated by his reedy, high-pitched voice with lingering hints of cockney. He was, in a word that cannot now be employed with the double layer of irony it could once carry, ‘common’. In short, he was ...”

“... Mayfair was developed from the 1720s, and by the end of the 18th century was established as the home of the beau monde, a position which it retained as long as the beau monde lasted. It was the ground rents thus created, subsequently augmented by revenue from Belgravia and Pimlico, which transmogrified the Grosvenors from insignificant Cheshire squires into ...”

“... her wish comes true. David lets slip that he plagiarised everything his wife wrote – ‘“The Lord is my shepherd,” a fortuitous turn of phrase, I can confess now . . . was haphazardly tossed off by my Bathsheba’ – and hoodwinked future scholars by passing off her psalms as his own. Psalm 23 appears – anachronistically – in Howard Jacobson’s ...”

“... after which Eyre’s career would have continued to flourish. The largest controversy provoked at home by the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier had been about Charles John Canning’s attempts as governor-general to rein back the brutality of the military reprisals. A slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, seven years before formal emancipation, had been visited ...”

“... the writing game, nothing seems as natural as laughter, and nothing as well parsed as dismissal. Lord Curzon was famous for saying a great many untrue things in a very true-sounding way. This makes him a hero of posh prose and many biographies have been written saying how marvellous he was, despite his reputation as an imperialist brute. Superior Person, the ...”

“... and Edward Bainbridge spent so long in an alehouse that their intended victim rode on by and home, causing them the inconvenience of having to attempt the burglary of a house full of people in order to gain the prize they had missed on the highway. Macfarlane’s final point is that the casualness of the offences was matched by the casualness of the ...”