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“... of the British political class of the 1930s as one looks at those Eden had to serve with. Lord Reading, the first Foreign Secretary he worked for, saw the post as essentially ‘a retirement’ job and did little. Next came Sir John Simon, not only lazy – he would flee the office if work threatened – but, as Eden noted in his diary, with ‘an ...”

“... Amy had borne the Duke a son . . . [she] retaliated by ensnaring the Honourable Berkeley Paget, Lord Anglesey’s brother, who left his wife and children in order to live openly with her’; ‘also in Paris, having run away with and then from Mrs George Lamb, was Henry Brougham’; and so it went on until the early 1820s, when the music slowed and then ...”

“... were household names in Europe and the new United States. In Italy in 1821, Lord Byron christened his newly built yacht the Bolivar, overriding his impulse to name it after his mistress Teresa Guiccioli. Byron even thought (briefly) of migrating to Venezuela, because it was ‘Bolívar’s country’. (It’s not very easy to picture him ...”

“... Odysseus. How often and how easily he weeps: on the shores of Calypso’s island when he thinks of home, then when he sees his drunken shipmate Elpenor in Hades, also in Hades when his dead mother tells him that back in Ithaca Penelope’s eyes are never free from tears, there too when he meets Agamemnon and they swap unhappy memories and the tears roll down ...”

“... Bolingbroke was greeted tumultuously as the prospective saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his cousin’s power. With Richard his virtual prisoner, and satisfied that those who had welcomed him would go along with the next step, Henry set about preparing to ...”

“... had to resign his post as Secretary to the Admiralty after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of course he wrote a diary, nine large ...”

“... else: a pseudo-monarchy, with government shared by a ‘single person’ – Oliver Cromwell, lord protector – and Parliament. Cromwell was backed by a written constitution, the work of another soldier, John Lambert, which focused on moderate franchise reform, checks and balances, and a certain degree of religious toleration. It was inaugurated in a ...”

“... a posh voice’. He advises them to read the Bible. ‘Capitalist lackey!’ somebody shouts. Lord, what did they say when their Catullus walked that way. Ernest muses that there are those who think that storytelling is effortless, and those who believe it entails dreadful wear and tear, lacerating self-exposure and self-vampirism. An old storyteller ...”

“... Its drays, loaded with casks and drawn by shire horses which also did a stint pulling the lord mayor’s coach, were still on the streets when we moved there in the 1960s. They won’t return. But troops of horses of the Household Cavalry, which woke us when we lived off Portobello Road, can still be encountered on their early morning journeys across ...”

“... but this didn’t deter Horowitz. As he read the Newport Mercury, the Knickerbocker and Arthur’s Home Magazine, ‘slowly, among these hundreds and then thousands of stories, using a set of critical discriminators, I began to identify what I thought might be stories written by Henry James.’ He then subjected his hunches to rigorous stylometric ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the opening of the Parliament of the Union of South Africa in 1910. And there was soldiering at home and on the reaches of Empire. In 1882, the Duke commanded the First Guards brigade at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt. He spent the remainder of the decade in India, first as a divisional commander at Meerut, and then as C-in-C of the Bombay ...”

“... subtitled ‘The Power to Alter Things’. Hitherto Beatrice had been mainly the stay-at-home book-writer and social entertainer, while Sidney pursued his activities in the London County Council as well as in the London School of Economics which the Webbs had themselves founded. Towards the end of this volume Sidney became an MP and a Cabinet ...”

“... a Ministry of Defence would entail the downgrading of the two historic ministerial posts, First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State for War. Even an obtuse politician could hardly have failed to recognise before very long that such an outcome was both the aim and the inevitable result of a Ministry of Defence. In 1903 Balfour was still writing ...”

“... He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way through the press conference which, to the Treasury’s dismay, first announced the causal link to lung cancer. The Cabinet, much ...”