“... have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he owns too many newspapers to run any of ...”

“... and alarmed if his gout did not return regularly. Besides, gout was very much a mark of status. Lord Chesterfield said it was ‘the distemper of a gentleman, whereas the rheumatism is the distemper of a hackney coachman’. It attacked not only the wealthy but the creative, which meant that no man of letters could afford to be without it. Some thought it ...”

“... blue pencil – although, considering that John DeLorean had at times retained the formidable Lord Goodman to defend his reputation, it is remarkable what the lawyers have let through. A jigsaw – and this is a jigsaw – is never going to be a work of art, but this is an exciting read, full of sex, drugs, high life, financial juggling, purloined ...”

“... Keynes (‘trying to turn himself into a heterosexual with a ballet dancer’) leers at Toomey, James Agate (‘a well-known sodomite’) makes a pass at the dreadful Heinz ... One is reminded, in a coarser way, of the closing stages of Proust’s novel, where one by one wellnigh the whole cast show themselves inverts.* After watching a porn movie in which ...”

“... the Commons or the country. There was something contrived about his political style: Robert Rhodes James has observed that his speeches ‘exuded insincerity’. Bracken was occasionally roused to defend the free-enterprise system by attacking ‘doles’ to the unemployed or minimum wages for miners, but even that roused little Tory sympathy. He still seemed ...”

“... English. There are impressive instances which seem to affirm this – notably in the 18th-century James Thomson, author of The Seasons, whom Robert Crawford treats with proper and welcome respect. Does any one seriously maintain that Thomson, a great poet, would have been greater if he had written in ‘the Doric’? In the present century, however, I number ...”

“... of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery. The status of an enslaved man, James Somerset, who had escaped in London and been kidnapped for re-enslavement became a national debate. The decision in 1772 by the lord chief justice that Somerset must be freed terrified the colonists. Edward Long, a ...”

“... sanctuary spaces ceased to be available. Still, the tradition of legal sanctuary clung on until James I finally ended it in 1623. A decade later, John Ford used sanctuary as a plot device in his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by ...”

“... needy ones ’at clusters all about Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you, ef you don’t watch out! James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote the above embarrassing and disgusting verse, was, of course, voicing what was, in the 19th century, considered a very proper and creditable sentiment. (The poem came out in his Rhymes of Childhood in 1890.) It contains, as well, an ...”

“... and bettering themselves. The titles of the memoirs reflect these successes: From Workhouse to Lord Mayor; Climbing the Ladder; Pitman and Privy Councillor; Onward and Upward; Success Hammered out of the Rock; and simplest of all, How I Got On. Only 12 of the autobiographers in Griffin’s sample of 350 who were born in rural areas remained agricultural ...”

“... it wasn’t altogether surprising that another gate opened, courtesy of Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, to a fellowship at Oxford. The only begetter of the study of literary theory at Oxford, he became the subject’s best-known teacher there, the leading authority in the field in Britain, and one of its most acclaimed proponents in the world ...”

“... when they were by. My arms and my legs were unusual encumbrances . . . and my bottom! . . . Lord help it! When I walked out of the room, it felt three times as big as it ever did before, and I thought it shaked most uncommonly! Weeton’s sense of physical and social dislocation was common among those working at close quarters with another family. Anna ...”

“... as the Huguenots themselves. At the centre of the archive is Marie de la Rochefoucauld, feudal lord in her own right of Champagné, who wrote a memoir of her strenuous lives in four different countries (lastly in Ireland). This exciting work, which for all its evidential value is also a manifest piece of self-fashioning, finally made it into print in ...”

“... care to mention one – even one – attainment of the Wilson period that could bear comparison?Lord Melbourne’s over-used but pungent observation about the Order of the Garter, that he liked it because there was ‘no damned merit in it’, is very necessary for any consideration or reconsideration of the Wilson phenomenon. If he represented anything at ...”

“... her mouth, or break from her. The blackmail story, which Fullerton related pathetically to Henry James as well as to Edith Wharton, his new mistress (or one of them), might, one thinks, have been all an interesting fiction to put a polite face on Fullerton’s lack of interest in committing himself elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes, following Arsène Lupin, would ...”