“... at some point, and certainly knows who Mrs Thatcher put in to run it recently (a chap called Sir Colin Figures, I am told: you would have spotted him in the last honours list if you had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior ...”

“... to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and the track to it hardly hearse-friendly so the grave when she eventually achieves it likely to be something of a relief. The church is interesting, though only the shell is the ...”

“... and whose nemesis, General Havelock, is commemorated by a statue in Trafalgar Square; and Archie Jones, resident of Willesden hailing from Brighton, twice married, who once came joint thirteenth in an Olympic cycling event. They are bosom pals, meeting regularly in O’Connell’s Pool House, where there are no pool-tables and the owner and sole ...”

“... and Ravitch exposed the myth of an increasing noble stranglehold on offices in church and state. Colin Lucas pertinently observed that this was a society of aristocratic aspirations defining itself by the status symbols of the past – land, seigneurial rights and office – rather than the economic resources of the future. There certainly was a large group ...”

“... or put him to work: ‘No one is going to sivilise me. I been there before.’ Huck, like Tom Jones, is outside the reach of everybody’s charity. But another American orphan over whom I used to agonise, the orphan par excellence, is Ellen Montgomery, heroine of The Wide Wide World. Poor Ellen: no one ever wept so much, or was quite so miserable, as ...”

“... had strength,’ she said, dusting a group of lemonade bottles of various ages. ‘Our Colin is going to be strong. He loved Colin.’ ‘Does he know?’ asked Midgley. ‘Yes. Only it hasn’t hit him yet.’ Hoarse shouting and a rhythmic drumming on the floor indicated that his son was seeking solace in ...”

“... skin is a flapping scroll. The interior of the boat can be achieved only by traversing an Indiana Jones gangplank. This is a final embarkation. You could never cross that gangplank twice. All the risks are visible. The deluge alone is missing. But the boat has no meaning without it. If the structure is to succeed, if we are to believe it, the deluge cannot be ...”

“... I was involved in. And so​ to My Lai, the subject of this authoritative new account by Howard Jones. The ghastly story burst on the world on 12 November 1969, when Associated Press wires carried the first report by the freelance investigator Seymour Hersh indicating that men of the 23rd Americal Division had carried out a massacre of civilians at My ...”

“... that ‘it would sound like a circus.’ It was her second book. The first, a life of Burne-Jones, appeared two years earlier, in 1975, when she was nearly 60. Until then child-rearing, teaching, a difficult marriage and the constant struggle to keep the family afloat – which failed several times, once literally when their houseboat sank in the Thames ...”

“... Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No ...”

“... A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch was ...”

“... pole-squatting and the like – were associated, by the instant social historians, with the Dow-Jones and the acquisitive excitements of the times. In Germany, however, hiking and food-faddism, the escape from the city and the movement back to nature, are now seen as symptomatic progenitors of anti-semitism and fascism. Shrapnel is cautious, agnostic ...”

“... This was easily promotable as a great American war movie. It came from a novel by James Jones, who had written From Here to Eternity; it focused on the taking of a hill in the Guadalcanal campaign; and it was crowded with regular soldiers depicted by big Hollywood names – Malick’s legend had grown such that the stars were eager to work for ...”

“... acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne was ...”

“... insisted that a second resolution was necessary to protect him from criticism at home, and got Colin Powell’s support for a futile attempt to circumvent a French veto in the Security Council. Such mutual hypocrisies put Annan in an awkward spot. Blessing the Balkan war was one thing: in 1999, the West was united in the attack on Yugoslavia. But now the ...”