“... 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 ...”

“... epitomises like no other the tension between ‘national’ and ‘economic’ principles. Home historically to Uzbek-speaking traders and agriculturalists, the city was surrounded by the winter and summer encampments of Kyrgyz herders, with whose economy the city was deeply interlinked. After considerable deliberation among local Bolsheviks in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 2042, produced during the First World War.A. 2042 was designed to be sent to family or friends at home by those on active service. It began by warning that ‘nothing is to be written on this side’ other than the sender’s signature and the date, and ‘if anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.’ It then offered a series of phrases, each ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of E.M. Forster’s Mrs Moore. She is a perfectly willing traveller, although she prefers being at home, and looks forward to getting back there. But her passage to India destroys the point of her life. In a sense it works too well – the Marabar caves, those well-known tourist attractions, are for her a real if ironic revelation – but in another sense the ...”

“... he married. Myrtle Jones was born into a farming family in Tasmania in 1893. In 1916, she left home to go on the stage, though neither as ‘Sandra Lindsay’ nor under her own name did she leave any trace in Australia’s theatrical history. In 1923, she married a British-born Gilbert and Sullivan trouper, Roy Workman, and late in 1926 they set out for ...”

“... be. Not near! not near!’) When his mother is hospitalised after an overdose, Demon is sent to a home for boys run by the fearsome Crickson, familiarly called ‘Creaky’ – the descendant of Mr Creakle, headmaster of Salem House in David Copperfield. There he meets a fellow inmate of whom even Creaky is in awe, the Steerforth character, whose real name is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”