“... theology he inherited, while resolutely demolishing the bricks and mortar beneath. Edward Schillebeeckx, one of the Council’s most eminent theologians, was summoned to Rome to be cross-examined no less than three times in the first year of the new papacy. Hans Küng, Vatican 2’s other great luminary, had his teaching licence revoked. ‘Be ...”

“... And for this they collected and accounted for small sums given ‘of devotion’. The store of the Young Men (all bachelors of communicant age) raised larger sums from parties (church ales) to keep the lights burning before the patronal image of St George. Although ‘devotion’ is a somewhat inaccessible substance – we cannot weigh or measure the piety of ...”

“... a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this ...”

“... a well-meaning but improvident clerk in the navy pay office, was sent to debtors’ prison, with young Charles put to menial work in a blacking factory – a social disgrace that demoralised him and from which he never fully recovered, keeping it a secret from the world (even from his children) until his death. The desire to have this experience ...”

“... The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to the floor, in the process tearing a piece out of my leg. Wendy, the ...”

“... has happened to her as trying to rejoin it, to rejoin the hopeless situation of herself and the young Indian, Hari Kumar, who knows only England and English ways, and now finds himself having to live in India and be an Indian. But these things don’t explain themselves: they have to be explained to us, and Scott explains them very well indeed, makes them ...”

“... of the closed shop, an ambition I finally achieved years later.’ Early membership of the Enfield Young Conservatives opened the way to a seat at Westminster, and in 1970, at the age of 39, he became the Member for Epping. Peter Carrington’s life, as his memoirs show, is remarkable for the apparent ease with which plum jobs fell into his lap. Where Tebbit ...”

“... Over recent years there have been sporadic disclosures of how MI6 really works, especially since Edward Heath made the foolish mistake of ordering MI6 into Britain’s own Irish backyard, where its methods were easy to watch. What Bloch and Fitzgerald have done is draw together all the threads of what has become privately and more or less publicly known in ...”

“... Baudelaire, Xavier de Maistre, Alexander von Humboldt, Ruskin, Burke, Wordsworth, van Gogh, Edward Hopper and the Book of Job. Of course, when de Botton dissects the writings of, say, Schopenhauer, he’s only interested in the ‘consoling and practical’ bits, which obviously means leaving quite a few things out. And since quibbles about ‘exactly ...”

“... displays shrewd political insight. Some of her material draws on personal experience, since as a young princess she had accompanied the emperor on his campaigns. For the rest, she was able to interview veterans and had access to the imperial archives, from which she cites documentary sources. Though she has been chided for her ‘mummified’ Attic ...”

“... was intended for them – a public seldom explicitly addressed in the novel. The year before, Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life, had purchased Lindisfarne Castle and commissioned his close friend Edwin Lutyens to adapt it as a retreat. The building was studiously modest, shorn of any obvious grandeur or pretensions to historical glamour, even ...”

“... behind the stereotypes of high criticism have been called into question. Sixty years ago G.M. Young wrote unselfconsciously about the ‘Victorian mind’ in his well-known Portrait of an Age, by which he really meant the mentality of its senior civil servants. Since then, historians have become more wary. Although they have continued to write about ...”

“... from Sotteville-lès-Rouen or Palavas-les-Flots. Droves of admiring postgraduates, like so many Young Raleighs, set out to comb obscure archives, and on their return delivered their reports from the front at Cobb’s Oxford seminar. The way to Richard’s heart would have been for one of us to work on his beloved Lille-Roubaix, whose Revolutionary archives ...”

“... could be more normal. The desire to escape, to travel, is deeply rooted in everyone, from the young runaway to the tourist, from the beatnik to the Sunday hiker. But suppose now that this desire to flee becomes an obsession, a truly irresistible compulsion. Suppose further that it all happens in a state of absence and you cannot remember any of it: you ...”

“... like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific (‘the wrath of God’), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated. The race to identify the ultimate ...”