“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are punishments for making one’s career abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets ...”

“... Indians and with one another. Of the ‘List of Inhabitants residing in Calcutta’ drawn up for Lord Clive in 1766, only 129 of the 231 European males were British. The rest came from Portugal, the German states, Switzerland, Sweden, French Chandernagore and Ireland. Life in this frontier world, as Jasanoff says, was ‘never a two-sided saga of colonisers ...”

“... have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are the main narratives. Rivers and roads, the long-distance elements of the landscape, are the geographical refrains of the genre. Williams’s lost highway is a metaphysical condition more than a place, a sort of Dantean circuit for damned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... live without eating? (Probably the latter, since he first tried out his theory on his horses.) Was Lord Seymour an ‘original’ or just a loutish practical joker because he fed his dinner guests laxatives and gave them exploding cigars? As Gill explains in her chapter ‘The Rise of Eccentricity’, early French views of excentricité showed a fearful ...”

“... stock and East India stock were all offering a better return than land – traditionally the home for new money, but now prohibitively expensive. The East India dividend was 10.5 per cent. The stock traded at 140-150, so the yield was a very attractive 7 or 7.5 per cent. The East India Company was an ailing mammoth. The old dream of a vast imperial ...”

“... part-time police officer and was shot and injured during the Troubles. She lives near the stately home of the late Lord Brookeborough, who, after the Northern Irish state was established, urged Protestant employers not to hire Catholics because their loyalty could not be relied on. He himself, he boasted, had ‘not one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”