“... father had survived the camps, but on his return to Poland had taken up life with a woman whom the young Roman instantly and inevitably rejected as his mother’s usurper. All this forms a well-known recipe for adolescent hooliganism. Polanski, however, who would have made a memorable little hoodlum in those years of black market and violence, surmounted his ...”

“... Iran Modern (2018), Pahlavi writes that the idea occurred to her in the late 1960s, when a young woman painter complained there was nowhere in Tehran where artworks could be permanently displayed. Pahlavi asked her cousin, the architect Kamran Diba, to come up with a design. He planned the building around a central atrium, which spirals below ground ...”

“... And her daughter’s really suffered. It just shows, someone can do something terrible at a very young age and then change completely, d’you not think? Yes, I say, unsure, out of my depth, yes I suppose they can. A tall, watchful, intense man with coal black hair streaked with silver, he seems eaten up by something, somehow closed in and elsewhere, yet ...”

“... as wilful – on the contrary, the misbehavers had their counterparts in the horde of priggish young who set about eroding the turpitude of wicked adults, as in the magazine story of 1827 called ‘The Pious Girl and her Swearing Father’: judging by her clinging attitude (she is illustrated with both arms clasped around his neck), he had plenty to swear ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”