“... 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 ...”

“... and British Columbia. On the accession of Queen Victoria, he was nominated by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to a baronetcy as the representative man of letters at the same time as Herschel was nominated as the representative man of science. His attempts to attain a peerage were for many years frustrated by his wife, who behaved after their separation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with ruinous results for their kingdom. The senior Howard was covered in glory, and so was his son Lord Thomas, who had served under him. The son would become Duke of Norfolk in his turn, and for the rest of Henry’s reign the two great East Anglians would vie for the king’s attention. At the time of his elevation it was unclear what Brandon had done to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”