“... 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 ...”

“... were battered to death and she herself was so badly injured that she died within the year. His son Edward fought in the thick of the First World War and was badly wounded. His daughter Margaret died agonisingly of tubercular meningitis. His house burnt down. His wife Monica, a woman of spirit and intelligence, was physically delicate and the constant prey of ...”

“... grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by ...”

“... the equally great Count Fosco in the book but also such men of the readership as Swinburne and Edward Fitzgerald, who named his new boat after her. It was difficult for the Rhoda Nunns of fiction to follow her. But Marian Halcombe had no need to work. Though not rich herself, she was half-sister to an heiress. Rhoda Nunn has to work, and this gives ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business.’ And even the saintly Edward Wilson, who once told Clements Markham that there was not a crevasse that he would not be prepared to fall through with Scott, warned Cherry-Garrard: ‘I know Scott intimately . . . I believe in him so firmly that I am often sorry when he lays himself ...”

“... chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a grammar school, which meant gathering a larger number of boys and making them sit still for even longer periods of time. When archaeologists excavated ...”