“... he doesn’t want to say that the crew might have left a living man behind. The crew flying home don’t know what is happening on Earth because no one is telling them and it will take them ten months to get back. Then a camera shows some sort of action on Mars, solar panels being moved, bits of broken tents being put together. This must be Damon at ...”

“... suggest that nobility dwelled among the nobility, that handsome did as handsome was. Mytens went home and became a picture dealer. Van Dyck, like many great portrait painters, came to tire of the job – or at least to look for more demanding work. A trip to France shortly before he died was made in the unsuccessful pursuit of a commission to decorate the ...”

“... figure at the centre of That They May Face the Rising Sun, however, is Joe Ruttledge, who has come home from London to live in this isolated place. He is both insider and outsider, watching and noticing just as a novelist does. His house resembles the one McGahern lived in, and some of the novel’s characters are lightly fictionalised versions of neighbours ...”

“... with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim about and so preserve their lives: How may we do? I fear me they will live. DUMAINE: Go place some men upon the bridge With bows and darts to shoot at them they ...”

“... wealth meant that respectable careers in banking and commerce gradually became available at home, while the rapid expansion of the East India Company’s army and administration provided options overseas (a posting to India, though not without risk, was an attractive option for young men who didn’t have the connections to establish themselves in more ...”

“... her Baptist upbringing in Leeds. Missionaries and African students often passed through the home: ‘The sense of a Baptist family stretching across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly ...”

“... forty but already – despite the private objections of George V – sitting in the Upper House as Lord Beaverbrook and considered indispensable by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The First World War had established him as a ‘press lord’, controlling the Express empire, as well as a member of the coalition ...”

“... culture’s mantle of top poet, a position Lowell had held unchallenged since the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle and his subsequent Pulitzer in 1947. Hayden Carruth, born in 1921, who edited probably the finest – and certainly the most inclusive – anthology of modern American poetry in the last century, The Voice That Is Great within Us, wrote in ...”

“... Banal panel discussions remind us of what Jinnah said or didn’t say. The perfidious Lord Mountbatten and his ‘promiscuous’ wife, Edwina, are denounced for favouring India when it came to the division of the spoils. It’s true, but we can’t blame them for the wreck Pakistan has become. In private, of course, there is much ...”

“... case pieces of raw experience, ‘hastily gobbled up’ on the journey and now ‘digested’ back home and ‘dispersed’ to his readers. The metaphor inescapably suggests the travel book as a kind of post-prandial fart. The title page is adorned with engravings depicting noteworthy comic events during the journey – his seasickness on the crossing to ...”

“... his best to make it inaudible.’ She was 21 and sometimes described as ‘wild’; her father, Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, fearing what he called her ‘bolshevick’ tendencies, was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but ...”

“... all the immortal scene, one of the most tragic in all cinema, in which Harihar the peasant comes home to the village from the city, bringing presents for his children, not knowing that his daughter has died in his absence. When he shows his wife, Sarbajaya, the sari he has brought for the dead girl, she begins to weep; and now he understands, and cries out ...”

“... of digging for gold or diamonds, he turned to supplying ostrich feathers for fine ladies back home. Four years after hoisting the Union flag he and his wife (a ‘brick’ of a girl, not his first choice) rented their house at £50 a week to the members of a Royal Commission organising the cession of the Transvaal, leaving Queen Victoria to enjoy that ...”

“... offices. Matters came to a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on ...”

“... to be had in Madrid to do the job with propriety. All this while Sybil Eccles, the daughter of Lord Dawson of Penn, was in Wiltshire with the three children: hence the correspondence. It is from Madrid and later from Lisbon that most of David’s letters are dated, with an interlude in Washington in 1941. It is not surprising that Eccles should have felt ...”