“... a dedicated traveller, mainly to continents beyond Europe. He went to Egypt in 1906, to Ceylon and India in 1910, and then made a round the world voyage in 1920-21 with stops in India, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, the US and Tahiti. In Polynesia he went in search of the originals for his literary god Pierre Loti’s ...”

“... American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel ...”

“... the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would be. The Spanish government allowed the British consul to recover his body, and later he was reburied, together with Torrijos and the other rebels, in the Plaza de Riego in ...”

“... had ever seen, though by then New York was larger than London and the empire had been shorn of India. You might wonder about this. Can it really be that in the early 1950s British children were taught that they lived in ‘the greatest empire the world has ever seen’? (I don’t remember that I was: it was something our parents told us that they had been ...”

“... She was 21 and sometimes described as ‘wild’; her father, Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, fearing what he called her ‘bolshevick’ tendencies, was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before ...”

“... read The Three Musketeers to her. She bought a yacht and cruised, one story had it, all the way to India, where she would only look at the fabled shore through a telescope before ordering the captain to make an about-turn, for Cannes. (Her clothes for the voyage she stored in a coffin.) Either she really was eccentric or those who later reminisced about her ...”

“... countryside and the great world. Eliza de Feuillide, née Hancock, brings in whiffs of British India and of France in the dying days of the Ancien Régime. Jane’s sailor-brother Captain Frank Austen reports in the Patrick O’Brian style on the high point of his naval career when, off St Domingo on 6 February 1806, his ship Canopus gave a French ...”

“... baronetcy after securing the Royal Society presidency; in 1795, the king insisted that he become a knight of the Order of the Bath, the red sash of which he delighted in wearing when taking the Royal Society chair; and in 1797, he entered the inner circle of Crown advisers as a privy councillor.) He left behind a trail of acrimony over his despotic ...”

“... gracious … this very good-looking lad, who seems even younger than his 33 years’. Coats was in India, and before long Channon was infatuated with Rattigan. Noël Coward told Channon that the ‘alliance’ was ‘one of the romances of the century’. After ‘our honeymoon’ in Brighton in January 1945, Channon showered Rattigan with gifts. His Diaries ...”

“... to the cabinet as ‘a very wicked man … ask anyone in Canada’) but Aitken had been made a knight in the 1911 ‘coronation honours’, and was worth more than $5 million. He had first visited London in 1908 with his new wife, Gladys (‘I hope the experiment will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to ...”

“... in the documentation of women’s lives’. But is the matter remedied by calling Ellis Cornelia Knight ‘Cornelius’? Or Helen Maria Williams ‘Helena’? Or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ‘Montague’? Or Cecilia ‘Cecelia’? Or Anne Ehrenpreis ‘Ehrenpries’? Or Patricia Köster ‘Koster’? Or Margarette Smith ‘Margaret’? Or Antonia Fraser ...”

“... lead onto the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s as well as a small lightbox room with dayglo scenes by Nick Knight, but one really needs to go all the way in the opposite direction, through the 1980s and some unlikely in-between rooms (including a round-the-wall timeline that ought to be at the start) and then backwards through the 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, 1930s and ...”

“... now a chain of shops selling Indian sweets, opened in 1965, catering to the immigrants from India and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) who had started moving into the Victorian terraces in the area. Their arrival galvanised a district long blighted by the noisy steam trains that thundered in and out of Euston; Drummond Street became the heart of the ...”

“... the idea of the future and is obsessed with evil. His parents are ‘legal’ immigrants from India, and his own story of success in making multi-millions has convinced him that everywhere is set fair for brown and black people in modern America. (He fools himself in the same way as every one of the black politicians who were happy to mount the podium for ...”

“... little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.’ Zweig himself travelled from Europe to India and America without ever having possessed or even seen a passport. Come the war, he continues, nationalism emerged to agitate the world … and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was ...”