“... 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 ...”

“... in Egypt in 1828, on an expedition sponsored by the Duke of Tuscany, and felt ‘as if he had come home’. His ‘swarthy complexion and excellent Arabic meant that he could easily pass for a native’, Wilkinson writes, echoing Champollion’s own claim to have ‘adopted the manners and customs of the country’. ‘The Europeans have already concluded that ...”

“... It would not be too much to say,’ wrote the otherwise unsympathetic Max (now Lord) Beloff after Harold Laski’s death in 1950, ‘that ... the future historian may talk of the period between 1920 and 1950 as the “The Age of Laski.”’ Thirty-seven years later a leading historian of the Labour Party observed that ‘Laski’s time and reputation have gone into almost total eclipse ...”

“... support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor ...”

“... time. Cyrus Spitama was present when Zoroaster was murdered and heard the voice of the Wise Lord speaking through his grandfather’s dying person. This gives him a position of almost prophetic superiority, but happily his sense of vocation is weaker than his political ambition (‘the way of the golden eagle of the Achaemenid’), and easily succumbs ...”

“... the left and – my word! – there’s Bradbury in the middle, totally unmarked, to nod the ball home. It would be unfair to suggest that there’s any devious kind of opportunism in this, which I am sure is not his nature, nor even that it’s in some way unhealthy, since he seems a writer pre-eminently concerned with our cultural ‘health’. It’s just ...”

“... his parents took pains to make ‘by no means indifferent to him’. His father was Henry Fox, Lord Holland, who made a lifelong career of court service and management in Parliament and a huge and dubious fortune as paymaster during the Seven Years War, and yet nursed and passed on to his son a grievance against George III for refusing him the additional ...”