“... 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 ...”

“... fact that he has never had a job, never wanted to ‘settle’ until late in life, never felt at home in his own perfectly respectable middle-class family and home. These are the themes of this autobiography. I didn’t really know Logue when I asked him to that lunch, didn’t realise how strongly he must have felt, as he ...”

“... on forbidden infidel activities, providing no Saudis are ‘corrupted’. Europeans may brew their home-made hooch, and discreetly indulge in extra-marital sex, so long as they remain in their hotel rooms or compounds, though technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering the Hejaz in ...”

“... book just how often he is talking to his supporters on the phone – presumably from his Berkshire home or from the Commons. Although even now he doesn’t appear to notice the fact, the diary records one of Kilroy’s major tactical errors. Late in his account he boasts of agreeing to have a TV film made about his reselection battle. The film left it unclear ...”

“... to their ghetto, made up mainly of diplomats, which gave them access to the essentials from back home – breakfast cereals and Coca Cola among them. I remember the wife of the correspondent of a well-known news magazine who had brought with her a three-month supply of toilet paper because she had been told it was not available in India. The ignorance does ...”

“... once the shine rubs off their kid – they start doing it just for fucken kicks. Vernon’s home-town, Martirio, is a biliously ignorant place, populated by obese women, coarse cowboys, leather-lunged pastors with strapping voices, slow-witted deputies, and the like. Its chief attraction seems to be the local restaurant, the Bar-B-Chew Barn, a name ...”

“... Britons on the home front in the Second World War bore the sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing, which were intended to constrain the demand for precious consumables, ensure their quality and allow them to be shared out equally ...”

“... called by far-right groups to take place and told the local Asian community to stay at home. In August 2015 Mushin Ahmed, an 81-year-old imam, was viciously attacked by racists; one kick left the imprint of the sole of a trainer on his face. A few weeks after his death yet another racist demonstration was called. The police allowed the march to ...”

“... they are well discussed in the catalogue by Ariane Banks in her chapter on ‘Carrington at Home’ and the design of the show recreates some of the trompe l’oeil effects at which Carrington excelled. There is an illusionary bookcase made for Lytton, its titles cut and pasted from other volumes to create such suggestive chimeras as ‘...”

“... company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed to be done to ...”

“... the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and ...”

“... The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer War. Later, as Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, their proprietorial arrogance and political manoeuvring became a legend. As Scott approached retirement, Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily ...”

“... care to mention one – even one – attainment of the Wilson period that could bear comparison?Lord Melbourne’s over-used but pungent observation about the Order of the Garter, that he liked it because there was ‘no damned merit in it’, is very necessary for any consideration or reconsideration of the Wilson phenomenon. If he represented anything at ...”

“... human personality, Orlando catches far more of Lady Mary than her travels east or her quarrels at home. As with Orlando, the difficulty of knowing her is compounded by gaps and contradictions in the record. Though it was not true, as Lady Mary once claimed, that she ‘never printed a single line in my Life’, both her class and her sex fed her profound ...”

“... first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can ...”