“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Board instead, cutting his junior’s salary for good measure. When Gladstone introduced his Irish Home Rule scheme. Chamberlain saw it as a personal challenge, which in part it was. Angry at his treatment, and convincing himself that Home Rule would not appeal to the new electors, he impulsively resigned from the ...”

“... powers of the House of Lords. Between 1912 and 1914 Ulster Unionists and their fellow diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support ...”

“... of Daily Express readers thought that the paper was pro-Labour – and that at the height of Lord Bea-verbrook’s career. The fact is that newspapers can influence opinion only when it is already flowing in a certain direction, or, perhaps, on issues remote from the reading public’s own experience: they cannot alter strongly-held opinions formed in ...”

“... entry for 5 January 1666 – first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by coach with four horses to London, to my Lord’s house in Covent-Guarden. But, Lord! what staring to see a nobleman’s coach come to town. And porters every ...”

“... ancient literature as much as in a Buckinghamshire graveyard. Even the ploughman plodding wearily home is a personage from classical poetry rather than 18th-century agriculture. Gray’s friend Thomas Wharton noted: ‘In England the ploughman always quits his work at noon. Gray, therefore, with Milton, painted from books and not from life.’ He did not seem ...”