“... fell into sublime lakes and cracked his head on interestingly gnarled trees while Peacock’s Lord Littlebrain moved mountains of earth at vast expense to make his grounds look more natural. But by then a generation was saturated with the aesthetics of the Picturesque, which had sunk so deep as to be invisible. Keats vibrated like a tuning fork to ...”

“... in the tradition of espionage literature (in a promotional video for Penguin he mentioned only James Bond and Mission Impossible). ‘I read very little,’ he explains, ‘so I have the audacity to write freely with no baggage.’ Decoded is far removed from any real-world spying, even though it was banned at first, under suspicion of containing – and ...”

“... radicals. Although he belonged to a different branch of Whiggery from the more francophile Charles James Fox, Pitt too was a Whig. He never described himself as anything else, and had championed parliamentary reform during the 1780s. At Horne Tooke’s treason trial, the reformer claimed that he was only repeating what Pitt himself had said a decade ...”

“... and mostly honourable performer. He could be a witty, sometimes moving memoirist – on Henry James, for instance, or on the mood in London at the declaration of World War One – and several of his essays thoroughly deserve (as he might well have put it) not to be forgotten. Also, when he took the trouble, he was a persuasive ‘close reader’ (see his ...”

“... to fresh troubles – until the time came for a genocidal pacification, ordered by none other than James I, and Armstrong said his last good night. Nationality counted for very little, compared with family. Perpetually at feud among themselves, a community of predator victims straddled the frontier, as did a population of the defenceless: ‘The poor and those ...”

“... pencil. As late as 1771, at the beginning of the decade of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of James Watt’s steam engine, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could still define pencils, not as lead pencils with points, but as brushes of hair or bristles used by artists to lay on colours, and could list the materials employed in their making as ...”

“... for which only 400 invitations were sent out. Mrs Astor found it convenient to take it (as Henry James would have said) from McAllister that great wealth could be a substitute for blue blood: it may have flowed in the veins of some of the 400, but the rest were instant aristocrats. What were the values of this new aristocracy, which, in the case of the ...”

“... as he is to enjoy; he did not want scholars to puzzle for a lifetime over his meaning and thought James Joyce, who did, ‘dotty’. So there are no revelations as to what he is saying, just an examination of how he says it. Nor did Waugh quite start at random and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when ...”

“... They were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the ...”

“... Communis, held that the ‘common honest man’ had an instinctive sense of the public good. Lord Chesterfield in 1737 declared that ‘our constitution is founded upon common sense itself.’ Of course, the more common sense came into political usage, the more the parties used it as a rhetorical cudgel against one another. In Aberdeen in the mid-18th ...”

“... Larkin recently inspired. Of that generation of younger poets represented by Andrew Motion, only James Fenton is a known quantity in America, and his renown probably stems less from his poems, meritorious as the best of those may be, than from his political journalism and celebrated daredevilry, This indifference to contemporary English verse appears all the ...”

“... on conquest.’ I believed, and still believe, Madame Tashibekova. As an MP who beseeched James Callaghan, Denis Healey and finally Harold Wilson not to send the troops – particularly the Scots regiments – into Northern Ireland in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how the Russians may have felt. They ...”

“... heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened ...”

“... which states that in the end-time the elect will be ‘caught up ... in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air’. Though splendid for the elect, this development inevitably means trouble for everybody else: airliners, their born-again captains raptured, will hurtle about the sky and then crash; on the freeways the cars of the elect will be driverless, to ...”

“... George, the authors say, did not attend the War Cabinet meetings: he was resting at the home of Lord Riddell, owner of the News of the World, and was out of telephonic touch with Whitehall – the weather was stormy. His defenders are entitled to retort that wars are not won by sitting at a telephone; they could also point to the passage in the Prime ...”