“... cliffhanger at the end of each episode. The crime is typically murder, usually serial, preferably home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true ...”

“... her. In this regard she isn’t snobbish. She is just as rude about the rare 1836 Madeira that Lord Carnarvon pours her – ‘exactly like petrol’ – as she is about the coronation chicken served her at the opening of some sheltered bungalows in Derbyshire: ‘This looks like sick.’In other respects, her snobbery can reach baroque levels. When her ...”

“... and his party, accused by the Times of having fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous ...”

“... more enterprising characters, who has escaped to work in the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, comes home on leave with habitual expectations, with the intention of standing rounds of drinks and distributing presents; after a few days the excitement dims into a recognition of ‘the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast.’ The great ...”

“... at Santa Marta, none at all in the well-fortified Cartagena, and then shaped their course for home before the hurricane season. But in August, when they were off Cuba, heading for Florida and the Atlantic westerlies, they met with an appalling four-day blow which so battered the Jesus that they had to cut down her upper works: her rudder was much shaken ...”

“... her cold she caught a heat’: well might he sigh, well might he groan! ‘Hierusalem, my happy home’ is missing (Quiller-Couch dated his version 1601), and so is George Herbert, who was only six when the century ended, and whose absence is partly compensated for by William Alabaster’s religious sonnets. Chambers left Donne for the 17th-century ...”

“... only by his sending ‘a muff of gardenias’ to his niece’s coming-out ball. Her parents, Lord and Lady Glenconner, launched their daughter with Austerity-busting splendour. A marquee, a New Look dress from Dior, a pillar of dry ice and she was ‘out’. Out into what is the question that occupies the rest of the book. What is a ...”

“... of the party in a cause that was politically so calamitous.’ These perceptive words by Lord Blake, the foremost historian of the Conservative Party, aptly sum up the handling of the issues of protective tariffs and imperial preference by the Conservative or Unionist Party between 1903 and 1914. These Edwardian years were dominated by the ...”

“... they belong to no society, for all have been uprooted from wherever it was they were once at home. Yet each of these fallen leaves swept along on the stream has its individual contour, even the illusion of an individual purpose, so that although the treatment is taut and remarkably sparing of sentiment, a vast pathos envelops the whole panorama, and ...”

“... localities through his men: by 1789, it represented nothing more than vestigial dues payable to a lord whose protective martial services were no longer required by the peasantry. Moreover, entitlement to these dues could be sold independently of the land to anyone, noble or bourgeois, who wished to invest in this way. Drawing on the earlier work of Philippe ...”

“... keep out, you publishing rascal – or if you do come in, don’t expect to find me at home. Arnold’s last two biographers have been assiduous in turning over the literary remains and, unless Cecil Lang has something up his sleeve, there are no exciting discoveries to be made in the surviving manuscript materials (as his endnotes ...”

“... i.e. avoid extradition to the United States by pleading guilty to a single offence, the drug lord had unaffectedly chosen to do his time in his hometown. Alone among the cabbies I encountered in Colombia, Maurio liked to drive without the accompaniment of the car radio. Also unusually, he wasn’t interested in discussing football and his country’s ...”

“... Van’ (1855) ‘Eighth Hussars Cooking Hut’ (1855) ‘General Estcourt’ (1855) ‘Lord Balgonie’ (1855) ‘Sebastopol from the Mortar Battery’ (1855) ‘Self-portrait as a Zouave’ (1855) ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ (1855) ‘View from Cathcarts Hill’ (1855)PreviousNext The camera’s capacity for transformation makes us ...”

“... he fled Berlin/the Bibliothèque Nationale/was the only place/he allowed himself to feel at home in./It couldn’t be a sanctuary/for it gave him only/a brief passing illusion/of safety that ended/with the German occupation.’ This passage appears as nine lines of verse, divided as above, but without punctuation. I see the point of getting ...”

“... Oxbridge accent of the White Paper is unmistakable, just as the spoken words of Sir Robert, now Lord Armstrong, are cast in prose as firm and reassuring as a handshake at a house party or an armchair at the Reform. This is not a sour or an idle reflection on class in Britain. It is in part an admiring recognition of the extraordinary way in which Britain ...”