“... 84 linen tablecloths, 800 napkins and 47 finger bowls. Though the Corsair carried enough coal to cross the Atlantic, Morgan often sent her ahead while he travelled to Europe on White Star liners. The Corsair was used for taking friends on cruises in the Mediterranean and along the coast of Italy, and, on the return home, to steam out to pick his party up ...”

“... those who cannot say ‘shibboleth’ properly. The rebels of 1381 carried banners displaying the cross of St George, only recently appointed patron saint of England.The fate of the Flemings was remembered by Chaucer when he wrote ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ only a few years later. The priest says of a noisy fox hunt: ‘Jack Straw and his men/Never ...”

“... hours. (With another hour thrown in to detour recent excavations, schlep the peninsula path and cross the odd motorway.) How long could it take on public transport? The Millennium Experience copywriters spoke with breathtaking self-confidence of a ‘12-minute’ ride from the centre of town (by helicopter presumably). The diggings on the peninsula (a ...”

“... March. A cold bright day in Yorkshire and I sit briefly at the end of the garden, watching a plane cross a vast sea of blue sky, leaving a single unfurled trail behind it. A plane such as this moving across virgin space must be more of a treat for the spectator than the pilot; it puts me in mind of myself as a child longing to be the first to jump (never ...”

“... and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages ...”

“... she just looked like a Scarlet Woman.15 April. Watch five minutes of Have I Got News for You with Nigel Farage the guest and Ian Hislop and Paul Merton their usual genial selves. I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives ...”

“... an appointment cutting across the role of Richard Hall, the paper’s Africa Correspondent. Nigel Hawkes, then Foreign News Editor, resigned that post in protest. The independent directors did not feel themselves called upon to adjudicate in that dispute since it was the editor’s own decision finally to hire Mutatu for a trial period, even though the ...”

“... especially by themselves? Is the line between the real and the fictional fixed, and could I cross the line of my own inquiry and do the police in different voices? Could I take a dead young man’s name and see how far I could go in animating a fake life for him? How wrong would it be to go on such a journey and do what these men had done? I chose to ...”

“... triumphant speech in the early hours of the morning when the referendum count was nearly complete, Nigel Farage concluded: ‘Let June the 23rd go down in our history as our independence day!’ The phrasing and the cadence told you that he wasn’t referring to India or America’s annual celebration of their freedom from imperial Britain. How could he be? He ...”

“... with a pronounced and visible capacity to be publicly enraged or publicly amused (it is Nigel Farage’s distinction to appear forever angry and amused at the same time) have been central to politics in the last decade, and to the ‘populist’ upheavals that have afflicted liberal democracies. The continually enraged or amused political leader ...”

“... birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child himself, hadn’t learned about these cross-currents by observation he could have paid more attention to the Narnia books. Roland, having passed the test in Elidor, is the true believer, but most of the other children’s dialogue could be redistributed without making a difference. At the end of The ...”

“... of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such as von Klenze’s Walhalla high above the Danube. There was no Arc de Triomphe, no ...”

“... after his death, but maintains a degree of prudence even when showing off. ‘I went home with Nigel Davies to his flat in Curzon Street and had an amazing connection and etc etc etc.’Channon was drawn to men in his own elite circle, but the trend in these books is for well-to-do men to seek sex and romance outside their own class, among soldiers and ...”

“... about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the ...”

“... wrong with it at the time. They included the most powerful man in the government, the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who was one of the few people able to stand up to Thatcher if he chose. Lawson attached a personal memo to the one supplied by the Cabinet Office in May 1985, in which he said that ‘the proposal for a poll tax would be completely unworkable and ...”