“... arose from the reforming ideals that Buxton shared with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their ...”

“... written about culpability on the British side, in particular the claim that Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, deliberately sacrificed the Lusitania to draw the United States into the war. Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea ...”

“... bit better than the Israelites under a thoroughly godly Protestant monarch like James I. To hammer home the point, the 1611 book devoted a whole page to the royal arms, just like the big heraldic display which congregations would see proudly affixed to the wall of their parish church as they sat in their pews (in careful hierarchical arrangement), listening to ...”

“... dams and mines to another British citizen, Baron Reuter (founder of the news agency). Even Lord Curzon was appalled twenty years later when he was told the terms, describing it as ‘the most complete surrender of the entire resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has ever been dreamed of much less accomplished in history’. Protests by ...”

“... bad; it might be a fresh opportunity to remake the world rather than something to be dreaded. As Lord Milner, the epitome of the higher imperialism, put it in August 1919, ‘We must try to extend the Pax Britannica into a Pax Mundi.’ The British were not alone in feeling like this, for, as Susan Pedersen points out in her magnificent study, the absentees ...”

“... units reporting dependency rates above 50 per cent. Many soldiers brought their heroin habit back home. The US government refused to acknowledge the connection with the opium trade in the Golden Triangle and blamed the epidemic in the US on Turkish poppy fields. A drug epidemic expedited by war gave the Nixon administration a useful alibi for its War on Drugs ...”

“... one occasion when I have broken out in a cold sweat of anxiety. It was on a Saturday morning, at home, when I was shaving and listening to the 7 a.m. BBC Radio News. Headline Number One: a senior civil servant had been taken into custody for an alleged breach of the Official Secrets Act. For many months, since July 1982, I had been campaigning by ...”

“... an episodic history (one reason for his subtitle: you don’t expect narrative continuity in home movies) and he has done so without serious modification of his normal conceited manner. The history is primarily that of two related families, Raines and Pasternaks (a second reason for calling the book a home movie). I ...”

“... and potentially lightweight 39. Superficially, this might seem an ill-considered gamble; but Lord Salisbury was not a man to play so recklessly with the jewel in the Imperial Crown. Curzon was an outstanding Viceroy, just as he was later (1919-23) to be the best-informed Foreign Secretary in a long time, where Eastern affairs were concerned. The ...”

“... covering the Lake Poets, the Inklings and scores of other writers who composed as they walked. (Lord of the Rings in particular reads like an overly grandiose guide to fell-walking in Middle Earth.) But I am sure the relationships between skating and literary style have not yet been the subject of serious study. As I skate, I keep an eye out for the Parks ...”

“... The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that ...”

“... The place I’ve called home for the past year or so is a motel just off Route 1 as it heads down the Pacific coast from Santa Cruz to Watsonville. Late on the night of the earthquake a friend called me from where she lived near Carmel, an hour’s drive south, to tell me what had happened. It was early the next day with me, since I was in southern Ireland, having just buried my mother ...”

“... railways, Russian industry, Malaysian rubber and, more prosaically, municipal gas and water at home. There was a great deal here to whet the appetite of the Forsyte class. And the banks which held the rest of that class’s savings sought a decent return on their deposits, too. Moreover, they were well placed to play a large part in City life after the ...”

“... new word in the vocabulary) and envy by the housewife in the shop queue of those ladies who sat at home while the chauffeur stocked up on food for hoarding. However, most of the class feeling tended to arise in the ‘wage-labour market’. Total mobilisation of the factories served to wipe out the bitter poverty in which all too many families began the ...”

“... seen material relating to the founder’s early years. Not, indeed, as much as one would wish: his home life and schooldays are still virtually a blank and we do not even know exactly where he was born. But from 1772, when he was 19, drawings and documents begin to accumulate and continue to do so to the extent that no other Georgian architect’s early life ...”