“... caught neatly in Partridge’s recipe for ‘Marmelade very comfortable and restorative for any Lord or Lady whatsoever’. Many manuscript collections present more intimate, first-hand associations (‘Cousin Mabel’s way of making almond milk’). Partridge’s recipes were (he tells us) ‘gathered out of sundry Experiments, lately practised by men of ...”

“... synagogue, and now, with the addition of a shiny minaret to its Georgian façade, it is spiritual home to the Bangladeshi Muslims of East London. Today hardly any British politicians have the courage to admit that immigration is essential to a successful society, but late 17th-century England experienced an uncharacteristic moment of generosity towards the ...”

“... fans week after week, which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem and taking a short cut home through these graves here they reassert the glory of their team by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer. This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit. Subsidence makes the obelisks all list. One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT ...”

“... streets of Reykjavik? I have one precedent I can rely on: Your own impulsive Letter to Lord Byron. I can’t cast you as you cast suave Lord B. –     An anti-fascist pal, who if alive Would give my views his raffish sympathy     And see the present through my decade’s eyes.     This letter’s no ...”

“... of his success in the first phase of his career, in the 1890s and 1900s. Marrying a daughter of Lord Lytton, Disraeli’s Viceroy, was a good start, putting Lutyens on that country-house circuit where he preferred fishing for work to fishing for trout. And one successful commission almost invariably led to another. Through a relative of Gertrude ...”

“... weakening of traditional religion focused greater attention on pain. When one’s hope and true home lay in heaven, earthly sufferings paled into insignificance.’ When you recover from stubbing your toe on the cliché, this looks so deeply questionable as not to be worth the speculating. ‘Traditional religion’ probably underwent more ...”

“... she wasn’t a bit surprised to hear it ‘since you see everything in terms of sex symbols … My Lord, Billy, recover your simplicity. You ain’t in Manhattan.’ She thought that poets were luckier than prose-writers if only because they weren’t generally read and therefore not generally misunderstood. All the same, some of the misunderstanding met with ...”

“... of that source. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island is explicitly mentioned on the last page of Lord of the Flies. A story by ‘Taffrail’ called ‘Pincher Martin, O.D.’ makes possible the ingenious final sentence of Pincher Martin (Golding’s Martin, unlike his more honourable namesake, never even got his seaboots off before he ...”

“... the age of 25, so the family seems to be getting more precocious from generation to generation,’ Lord Stansgate observed in 1950, adding: ‘He is a very keen and active member of the Church.’ Though young Wedgie was moving away from institutional religion, he remained a true disciple of a secularised nonconformist ethic, ready to declare in 1989: ‘The ...”

“... postmen one reads about from time to time, who lose their grip on the job and keep the letters at home instead of delivering them, hoping to sort it all out later but never able to because the mass of undelivered mail keeps growing? Redfern does not take this sympathetic view. It is clear from his report that he does not approve of van Velzen at all. The ...”

“... as many days, with no promise to meet their demands, the Lincolnshire men were persuaded to go home. Their movement had fizzled out. Any credit belonged to the Lincolnshire gentry, who had regained control. So Henry VIII ordered the disbandment of an Army Royal, also numbering about twenty thousand, which had mustered in Bedfordshire to confront the ...”

“... not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the author’s local lord and his nephew. This is the least likely to be true. The second earliest source contradicts all the others by recording Harold’s fall in the battle’s first phase. This is almost certainly because the source or his copyist misread the Latin abbreviation ...”

“... wanted was to know – which, among other things, has made him popular with philosophers. From his home town of Thagaste, he goes to study in Madauros (365-369), a small but well-known intellectual centre, also in North Africa, then in 370 moves on to university in Carthage. There he finds a mistress, another North African whom he never names, with whom he has ...”

“... to Labour – in Reading West the swing was over 7 per cent – while both the seats in Luton, home of the original ‘affluent worker’, which were gained by Labour last time and where the closing of the Vauxhall works might have made the Party vulnerable, also swung to Labour. Although the Conservatives picked up two seats on the Essex borders, their ...”

“... member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just so happens that Lord Griffiths also chairs the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies. Two of his ...”