“... 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 ...”

“... Horatio why he has come back from Wittenberg, Horatio replies, ‘a truant disposition, good my lord’; to which Hamlet replies: ‘I would not have your enemy say so.’ Hamlet can’t accept this description of his friend, which he calls ‘your own report against yourself. I know you are no truant.’ In Hamlet’s view, it’s a terrible thing to call ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the autobiographies of W.H. Hudson, Forrest Reid, Eleanor Farjeon, Christopher Milne and Lord Berners, and ‘The Child at Home’, discussing Victor Gollancz, Augustus Hare, Stephen Spender, Winifred Foley and Neville Cardus. These categories are speculative instruments rather than immutable structures, and they ...”

“... Callaghan, then Prime Minister, just before the 1979 General Election, as the two men were driving home to Downing Street in the official Rover: You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves ...”

“... hazardous occupations known. ‘It is better,’ the fisherman’s father liked to say, ‘to be home wishing you were at sea than at sea wishing you were at home.’ Or as the Psalmist put it: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, That do business in great waters, These have seen the works of the ...”

“... when I was 14. But it wasn’t drugs, or booze. I didn’t drop out of school or run away from home; in fact I stayed in. When you are addicted to fan fiction, you don’t need to leave the house to escape.Tossing the textbook on his bed, he rummages around on his shelves for another, before grabbing his soft school satchel and waving his wand over it in ...”

“... for a general reader.Catherine was born in Portugal on 25 November 1638, St Catherine’s Day. Her home was the vast Vila Viçosa, set among olive groves in Alentejo, outside Lisbon. She was the fourth child of João, duke of Braganza, and Luisa de Guzmán, from the house of Medina Sidonia, one of Spain’s most prominent families. João was bookish, liked ...”

“... a young man quits his father’s Wall Street firm and retreats to the family’s New England home, where he wanders aimlessly before taking part in a drunken game of Russian roulette that kills a childhood friend. In Partisans (1955), the son of a US diplomat also resists entering the family trade, under the sway of what’s called in the book only ...”

“... Harrison was sued for using the tune of the Chiffons’ ‘He’s So Fine’ for ‘My Sweet Lord’, the $1.5 million in damages might have raised a smile or two in some quarters, and lovers of literary mischief might have grinned to think that pious old George’s subconscious turned the background ‘Do lay do lay do lay’ of the original into ...”

“... of C.P. Snow, the novelist, playwright and scientist to whom she was married for 21 years [sic]. Lord Snow was 74 and died 1 July 1980. Although her fame was often linked with her husband’s, Pamela Hansford Johnson had an independent name and career in British letters. In fiction that grappled with contemporary social and human concerns, her writing ...”

“... emperor, he summoned them in the afternoon. Nixon, Henry Kissinger and an aide called Winston Lord quickly got into a limousine with Zhou and set off, leaving Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, frantic with worry over their security. They entered Mao’s house, finding it ‘simple and unimposing’, as Kissinger noted, and with a ping-pong ...”

“... and while Griffiths’s identification of the other three figures as John Gerard, his patron Lord Burghley and his collaborator the Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens seems plausible enough, a tissue of improbable conjecture is required to place a mere playwright and actor alongside Elizabeth’s lord treasurer on the ...”

“... he had heard from Gertrude Tennant. It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust. ‘Yielding to family pressure,’ as James put it, ‘he offered his hand to ...”

“... episode five, when, regardless of what actually happened to her real-world equivalent, she comes home exhausted on a Friday night, and before she has even put down her handbag there’s a programme on TV about what she is wearing. ‘She’s frump incarnate,’ the presenter says. On a radio station, the topic of discussion is whether she is ‘a bitch or a ...”