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“... but also Neale Fraser, Mal Anderson, Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe and Fred Stolle (plus lesser stars like Don Candy and Bob Howe). I wanted to know more about South African tennis during apartheid, which gave rise to Sturgess, Gordon and Jean (his sister) Forbes, plus the colourful Abe Segal, and fine Davis-Cuppers like Bob Hewitt, Ian ...”

“... for Expansion, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mrs Margaret Thatcher), December 1972. I do not think that irrevocable damage has yet been done, but I do regard the situation as alarming in the sense that the contribution made by Britain to world science will be severely reduced if the factors now operating are ...”

“... boys, leather queens, clones and other species of sex dandy are pinned down with accuracy; also lesser varieties, the pin-stripe City queen, ‘like a gentleman farmer looking for a prize bull’, and the ‘straight queen’ who ‘sleeps with his wife and loves his children but is tormented by the memory of a wicked fling in Cambridge with a ...”

“... conversations with his Roman neighbour Italo Calvino, lunch with E.M. Forster, chat with Princess Margaret. But in Rome there were only months of reading, and Old Glory. Few people have identified themselves as closely with the history of their own country as Vidal has – General de Gaulle maybe. In Italy, he began his series of historical novels on the ...”

“... and outlook were shaped by his Habsburg family: his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, and his aunt Margaret of Austria, who was Charles’s guardian and – until he reached his majority – governor of the Netherlands. While Charles showed little enthusiasm or aptitude for formal learning, the materials for his princely education were all around him, in the ...”

“... that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty – for starters, lack of ...”

“... Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could bear, as Carlyle grew into stentorian middle age, silently to ...”

“... his nobleman profile tilted ever so slightly upward, as if he were listening for ethereal music lesser mortals cannot hear.He proceeds to spend the next hour talking to me without ever looking at me. His voice is scarcely audible … he makes so faint an imprint on his surroundings, I keep fighting the uneasy sensation that he might dematerialise before my ...”

“... whereas I was plus 19. What would her face have looked like if I had dictated something about Dame Margaret Thatcher? Her face now clinches my point: we underreact to untruths about the past and over-react against untruths about the present. The Barneses could never have written their meticulous ‘Publishing History’ if they hadn’t been downright ...”

“... princess of Corinth; in revenge Medea poisons Jason’s new bride (‘murder by toxic frock’, as Margaret Atwood calls it) and kills the children she’s had with him. Ovid, Seneca and Shakespeare all draw greedily from this cup of horrors. In spite of her virulence, the figure of Medea commands our attention – and our sympathy. Dante put Jason in the ...”

“... with his subordinates – was admired by those in special operations, who had little respect for lesser mortals with four stars on their epaulettes. The regular military, however, did not worship McChrystal, or the rules of engagement he applied in Afghanistan. His preference for deploying small covert teams away from prying eyes clashed with the expansive ...”

“... birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first two children, Joan and Margaret, in infancy. The prospects for their newborn’s survival – and perhaps their own – must have seemed grim. Just a few doors down from their home on Henley Street, their neighbours the Greens would lose four of their children to the epidemic. Windows ...”

“... so clear cut. Following visits to Polish orphanages after the Armistice, the child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld wrote that ‘the black misery of prisoners of war is very like the depressions of infancy.’ The study of the adult mind disordered by war helped encourage a fuller elaboration of the psychic life of the child, which itself seemed to be ...”

“... success, together with the increasing professional interest in the social history of ‘lesser people’ in general, has, however, obscured the sometimes shaky nature of the arguments and assumptions which underpin many of his reconstructions. The most obvious problem is to be found in the documents he has used. We know little about the daily lives ...”

“... insufficiently appreciated; moneys owing him unpaid; contractual obligations to him unfulfilled; lesser men securing the preferment and acclaim that were rightfully his. If Hooke enjoyed his life, his diary offers little evidence of it. He was more concerned with intellectual property than with his colleagues’ opinion of him, and history has served him ...”