“... therefore, she subsequently improved it. On his way to the wedding, George told his friend Lord Moira that he would ‘never love any woman but Fitzherbert’. Caroline had thus to contend with a wife, or former wife, and a reigning mistress. She never had a chance of winning. George was drunk at the wedding ceremony, and drunk and probably impotent ...”

“... minutes’ – which means that Bozzy picked up a prostitute in the few yards which separated his home on the Lawn-market from the law courts in Parliament House. He began to drink again, sometimes throwing things about the house when he returned; he tried to control himself (never more than six glasses of wine at a time, he promised his friend Temple), but ...”

“... of drama in the story of how the news of her father’s death came to her in Kenya and she came home as Queen. She entered upon her new duties as one would have expected. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m strong as a horse,’ she said in reply to those who worried that she might be asked to do too much at the Coronation, and: ‘Did my father do it? Then I ...”

“... of war: in fact, the nearest I have come to war was in 1940, when I and other members of the Home Guard patrolled round Oxford gas works. We foresaw with a flash of strategical penetration that the entire German parachute force would land on Oxford, if only because Oxford was supposed to be in those days a seat of learning. Why it should concentrate on ...”

“... 1921 because of the social differentiation between Ulster and the Southern Unionists (who, under Lord Midleton, made their reluctant peace with the Republic). The tragedy for many Ulster Unionists was that, even by the mid-19th century, England was already outgrowing the political economy on which Pitt’s Union had been based. Ireland received the same ...”

“... says, ‘in the air of this country, I mean, which makes these old Franco guys feel very much at home. Free to do what they feel like ... ’ They are not all old, either. Baltasar has seen their young supporters training in helmets and flak-jackets, with plenty of money behind them. His dreams and visions get worse, and so does the news, making his terror ...”

“... Function (Stansted Airport) or the need for exceptional lightness and openness (the new stand at Lord’s cricket ground) or the nature of the business (the ITN building) have all been reasons to turn to it. Styles which advertised probity with bronze and granite were becoming popular when, with a great piece of salesmanship, Richard Rogers persuaded ...”

“... era; the best work naturalises what’s alien in other times and places, makes its readers feel at home. If you want to experience the otherness of the Victorians, don’t read George Eliot, read Charlotte Yonge. Stafford makes me taste the alienation and disenchantment of the mid-century zeitgeist as – for example – her contemporary Eudora Welty ...”

“... in Valhöll (‘the halls of the slain’), where the entertainment wouldn’t be praising the Lord, but fighting and feasting, and where the undead heroes would be raised to life every evening to fight again the next day. Nor would this be eternal life: gods, heroes and Valhöll itself would be extinguished in the fires of Ragnarök. As the Old Norse poem ...”

“... you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you see a garden which has nothing in it but an abandoned car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books. Gardening as an activity, however, is rather more complex than the gardens ...”

“... English knight from St Albans, claimed to have travelled the world for 34 years before returning home in 1358 to compose his Book. The work survives in some three hundred manuscripts in ten languages, followed by a robust print life. It was known to Columbus, Leonardo and John Dee, influenced cartographers, and inspired London stage plays. Yet no one knows ...”

“... to extend her studies, chiefly – it seems – so that she wouldn’t be forced to go back home. In 1926 she wrote to a friend from her parents’ house: ‘Here I am plunged in the middle of Benares brass life, and Japanese screens … I am too depressed by the hideousness … and the bric-à-bracs.’ At the Slade, she was part of what Tonks declared ...”

“... is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess Townshend’s Raynham ...”

“... places for different reasons. In Ramsay’s poem, a young man is leaving both his West Highland home and his girl behind, perhaps because he intends to join the British army or navy. In Nicol’s painting, the couple are migrants reluctantly quitting the old world for the new, perhaps because their landlord has evicted them. In the ...”

“... contemporary idealism (empire as duty, racial superiority as obligation, war as necessity), with Lord Cromer cited in 1908 to warn against baser motives: ‘We need not always enquire too closely what these peoples ... themselves think best in their own interests ... But it is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly [on the basis of ...”