“... 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 ...”

“... rattlesnake and the mating of two bloodstock horses – are marvellously written and help ram home, as it were, the point that nature is both earthy and pitiless. Conrad Hensley’s two transfiguring moments, of being exploited and victimised in a frozen-food warehouse and of being set upon in a California penitentiary, are equally vivid. All of these ...”

“... pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield attacking Pitt’s government for its suspension of habeas corpus at home and its conduct of the war abroad.The first disaster to overtake Johnson, however, was another of the endemic dangers of the city. Fire broke out in the back room of his shop in January 1770 and, according to the General Evening Post, ‘spread with the ...”

“... a strenuous sense of calling, but also a rigorous education When as a 16-year-old Annie returned home, it was with strong Anglo-Catholic yearnings, nurtured by a reading of the Church Fathers, and with what her mother considered an unbecomingly earnest desire to ‘serve Christ’. The best solution to such sentiments was no doubt marriage and it was in this ...”

“... by the minister from his pulpit. Magnus makes a spirited reply: ‘You call this da House o’ da Lord. Pah! It is da House o’ Oppression. A tool of da ruling classes to keep da poor fae rebelling ... ’ This outburst is injudicious. The villagers are affronted. Further incensed by the law’s delays, they seize Magnus and lock him up in a ...”

“... Country’ ones with which the Eldridge Pope brewery had adorned so many local roadsides back home. It was just more of the same stuff only a bit further up and with more lakes, except you had to call them lochs. Ireland, admittedly, was different, if only because you arrived at breakfast time feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes ...”

“... creator of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), the Earl of Malmesbury, the Count of Schleissen, Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the present century next to Liston and Lord Carlyle’), Jung Bahadur (the Nepalese ambassador to London), Savile Morton (a journalist friend of Thackeray), Augustus Noel ...”

“... The Lord giveth​ and the Lord taketh away. Likewise François-René de Chateaubriand. Again and again, in this first volume of Memoirs from beyond the Grave, a character is introduced only for their death to be immediately announced. ‘President Le Pelletier de Rosambo, who later died with such courage, was, when I arrived in Paris, a model of frivolity ...”

“... he was teaching a class and was summoned from his desk by a caretaker, who commanded him to go home and change into a suit. ‘When I asked him what he was talking about, he said: “Harold’s spewed it.” ’ In the House of Commons, apparently, the reception was similar, with clerks flinging open the doors of the various committee-rooms to announce the ...”