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“... because she was a replica of her ill-fated kin, a relic of the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad ...”

“... the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – Lord Sandwich, a former first lord of the Admiralty, was a friend, a fishing companion and Fenlands neighbour – and by spreading money about. Banks’s personal paid-for entourage for the voyage included the talented Swedish ...”

“... Cavendishes, who had no need to exploit the empire because they already owned massive estates at home. The Greys were a hardy Northumbrian family whose acreage was only a tenth of that owned by the local duke, a Tory, but they intended to be his political equals. They rose financially and socially through service to the army and the crown, at ...”

“... with all such mediation. He sent the Westmorland Gazette – a weekly Kendal paper founded by Lord Lowther in 1819 to propagandise against the Radicals – pages that were exactly ready for the press: the correct size, so no reduction or enlargement was needed; hand-drawn and hand-lettered in waterproof Indian ink, so no typesetter was needed; and of ...”

“... more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and consolation. Sidney and Greville had been born in ...”

“... magnificent stained glass windows glowing with harps, crowns and Union Jacks: mementos of the Home Rule that was delayed by the First World War, to be followed instead by the Rising, Partition, and all the capitalised Troubles that eventually brought us here. It looks like a C of E garrison church minus regimental flags, but only down to floor ...”

“... shown a collection of German watches and invited to take his pick. The war had hardly begun before home newspapers were offering £5 for exciting letters from the Front, so the men, tongue in cheek, sat down to oblige. ‘Since these adventures were untrue and of no value to the enemy, officers did not bother to censor them.’ The official battle reports ...”

“... Ceylon – ‘a land of blood and mange’ – was full of phenomena. Even persons still at home and with some claim to have escaped phenomenal status – Forster, for example, and Keynes – are given some severe treatment. It might be said that much of what Woolf wrote in those days was designed to impress Strachey. Possibly for that reason among ...”

“... engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until three o’clock in the morning in the empty marital home, ‘afraid; afraid of the future, afraid she was going mad, afraid of the wind rattling on the windows’. One’s first impression is that The Listeners is repellently written – or, to be fairer to the author, written in a deliberately trashy, novelettish ...”

“... into an oppressively conventional one.’ Biography is not, perhaps, a very suitable form of home industry. The inevitable reaction against a famous writer at his death combined with the reception of the Memoir to turn the greatest poet of the Victorian age into something of a period joke. Under the guise of rehabilitation Harold Nicolson’s biography ...”

“... of politicians were killed by overwork, Pitt and Canning among them. Overwork undermined Lord Castlereagh, Samuel Romilly and Samuel Whitbread II, who committed suicide, as did 16 other MPs in this period. Spencer Perceval, however, was shot by an unbalanced debtor, so becoming the first and thus far the only British premier to be assassinated. MPs ...”

“... milk run’ to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me. Soon after I read a book entitled Alpine Tragedy. Its most telling point was made in a series of photographs of the great Alpine peaks: etched down their ...”

“... With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous fascination’ with the detailed preparation. He caught the mood of the moment. ‘No one can measure the consequences,’ he recorded; ‘we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance ...”

“... on his luck, but he had never known poverty and the only charity he required began and ended at home. During the period of rural tranquillity that followed his tumultuous years in London, Winstanley began hearing voices and having visions. The conclusion of the Civil Wars and the imminent execution of the king drove him into a chiliastic frenzy in which he ...”

“... Court’s jurisdiction. Irritated, the SNP set up a further review group under the chairmanship of Lord McCluskey. Alas, that group endorsed the views of the first panel. In the interim Alex Salmond, then the first minister, and his secretary for justice, Kenny MacAskill, had engaged in highly personal attacks on the UK Supreme Court and its members, prompting ...”