“... Anyone who knew or knew of James Lees-Milne in his later years might have formed the impression of an exquisitely polished round peg in a perfectly round hole. Aesthete, diarist, wit, he had known everyone from the Mitfords to Mick Jagger and wrote about them amusingly. His work for the National Trust over three decades had made him personally and professionally familiar with most of the great houses of England ...”

“... folding later in the week. On her day off, Rebecca scrubbed dirt from the clothes of her husband, James, and their three children. The family lived not far from the Roman Baths and close to the River Avon, but there was no direct water supply to the last house on Back Street Place.Rebecca wanted her daughter Rose to have a different life and sent her to ...”

“... categories which too often close enquiry before it has commenced. Some in the West are prisoners of vast undiscriminating categories ... and bring those ready-made slide-rules to measure, and often to obliterate, the complexities of the past.’ That could stand as motto for all three works. Beyond the Frontier is hacked from the same hard ...”

“... of himself sits oddly with a rather stiffly elevated prose style – a strange combination of Anthony Powell and the ‘aforesaid’ and ‘as has been noted’ of the legal brief – and if one were to be searching for a clue to the author’s true self-valuation, one might start by looking at his syntax rather than at any of his stated sins. A further ...”

“... had largely been won, and so anti-slavery campaigners could attack the economic argument that West Indian plantations were essential to the success of the British Empire. In America, by contrast, slavery was a political and social problem. What would happen if more than half a million slaves were suddenly freed? The received wisdom of many observers in ...”

“... the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp. He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the ...”

“... it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of the Service. Glees is a professional historian and rightly attempts to place British intelligence operations in the context of the twists and turns of British foreign policy. In so far as it is possible, Glees has been meticulous in ...”

“... window.’ Suvorov, now a young GRU officer, is told he won’t desert because, however richly the West were to reward him, he would be no different in the West from everyone else; on the other hand, as a member of the Soviet nomenklatura, he can be the envy of everyone in the Communist world. Shevchenko was rather more ...”

“... called Crazy Golden Slippers, a bunch of lacquered shoe drawings, where each shoe was called Mae West or James Dean or Elvis Presley or Julie Andrews. As a strictly commercial artist Warhol not only knew how to make things pretty: he had the knack – the New Yorker-ish knack – of making style a matter of poise and ...”

“... success of Fortunes of War, the 1987 TV version of her two trilogies set in the Second World War (Anthony Burgess, a fan, called them a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her ...”

“... probably the best one can say for Britain’s foot-dragging. It was the way to get shot of what James Callaghan called this ‘poisoned chalice’ with least fuss. It depended, however, on Argentina’s patience. In 1982 that finally snapped. Confused, perhaps, by the FCO’s subtle diplomacy; sharing the British military’s assessment of the difficulty of ...”

“... modernism of the interwar years, as introduced by émigrés from fascist Germany, is inner North-West London: the borough of Camden, and to a lesser extent Westminster, Barnet and Brent, with Hampstead and Highgate at the epicentre. It is here that you can find the major buildings of Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, the houses of Connell, Ward and ...”

“... contrast, was always imagined as a safe place. The Longs were welcomed by their relatives – rich West Indian merchants in London and landed gentry in Suffolk. They settled in Chichester, a genteel southern English town, in an area liked by returning ‘West Indians’ because of its tranquillity and its relative proximity ...”

“... Gaza, Palestine’. His father was Abu Jihad, commander of Palestinian military operations on the West Bank. On meeting him, Friedman thought to himself: ‘That’s amazing. From Che Guevara to Dale Carnegie in one generation.’ The book uses these nascent Americans to make the point that everyone wants to do the best for themselves and their ...”

“... Abrahamus Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their ...”