“... of Valencia since the early 1460s. The city was the largest port in the western Mediterranean and home to many foreign merchants and artists. Saint Michael was the central panel of a large altarpiece commissioned by Antoni Joan, lord of Tous (50 km from Valencia), and it is him we see praying for forgiveness in the ...”

“... calling it ‘completely offensive’ and contrary to common sense; an attack taken up by the home secretary (who thought it appropriate to question the sanity of the decision), but sharply criticised in the Times by the crossbench lawyer-peer Lord Pannick. The naming of Goodwin and Giggs is on a different plane from ...”

“... À Rebours (1884), nor an anguished anticipation of modernity like Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902) or Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) or Gottfried Benn’s Brains (1916), but really stuck – and stuck in every sense – in the middle. The gist of it was written down when Valéry was 21, maybe a jeune parque, but ...”

“... the chapter which deals with the Irish rebellion of 1798. In France, just before the Revolution, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Emily’s son, converted to Republicanism. It was called ‘the levelling movement’ by Lady Emily, the last person one can imagine being levelled, who placidly remarked: ‘I think it charming to hear talked of but I fear they will never ...”

“... and it was overpopulated with the sons of Empire, for whom the colonies were more real than home. Churchill contributed to the Party’s malaise. His strident anti-socialist rhetoric disguised the lack of a coherent alternative, and he did what he could to prevent constructive policy-making. When he returned to power in 1951 his real strategy, as ...”

“... rebellions. In Greer’s case, three of the crucial determinants were (of course) her parents, her home town of Melbourne and Roman Catholicism. An eldest child, Greer got on unevenly with both her parents, while re-enacting in her own way their respective peculiarities. Her mother Peggy was a one-time milliner who made stabs at reinventing herself by working ...”

“... tents. Yet Monty’s scholarship was a puzzle to some. One of these, as Michael Cox recounts, was Lord Acton: ‘You know Montague James?’ he asked a King’s man. ‘Yes, I know him.’ ‘Is it true that he is ready to spend every evening playing games or talking with undergraduates?’ ‘Yes, the evenings and more.’ ‘And do you know that in ...”

“... than a pointed scrambling of high and low ranks, like the juxtaposition of ‘Pimps, Poets, Wits, Lord Fanny’s, Lady Mary’s’, and I think they indicate more than ‘Pope’s special tendency ... to cast into doubt the proper association of rank with merit, virtue, or even good manners’. They are a matter of putting lords down in lordly ...”

“... dilemmas which Cook sensed seem to have impinged less on the younger man. He was young, and coming home famous made him self-important. He had what O’Brian calls a sudden rush of pomp to the head. As a result, he missed the next boat south. A new expedition was planned. Banks demanded a larger ship and a greater degree of personal control than the Admiralty ...”

“... Morning Post unearthed Some murders I’d devised A Polish organ of finance At once apologised. Lord Robert Cecil’s Report – in effect, the report of the Select Committee’s opposition members – was published, like the Select Committee Report itself, in June 1913. The three censures on Samuel contained in it illustrate vividly that ...”

“... an alphabetical card index which occasionally included physical mementos. There were records for Lord Alfred Douglas, Steward’s lips landing ‘where Oscar’s had been’; for Thornton Wilder, who lasted ‘ninety seconds and a dozen strokes’; and the 18-year-old companion of the ageing André Gide, offered up in a bedroom lit only by a ‘frilly little ...”

“... estate: ‘No one can or should excuse himself from bearing arms in a just cause, whether for his lord or for his lineage or for himself or for Holy Church or to uphold and defend the faith or out of pity for men or women who cannot defend their own rights.’ No one should excuse himself: the clear injunction is that the worthy man at arms (the prudhomme or ...”

“... wealth and, after he married Isobel, they had the Eno’s Fruit Salts fortune, too. His father, Lord Parmoor, formerly a Conservative MP, had been given his peerage by the Liberal Government just before the First World War, and after it he entered the first Labour Government in 1924, along with his brother-in-law, ...”

“... and Churchill liked one another and worked together perfectly, with Attlee taking charge of the home front. As Jago points out, he managed the difficult job of being loyal both to Churchill and to the Labour Party by being absolutely straight with both, saying that complete unity was necessary while the war lasted but that even in the course of the war ...”

“... never got to play as often for England as they should have done, because the selectors at Lord’s were too high-and-mighty to take the train to Taunton and get a good look at them. Underdown’s lingering resentment about this surfaces from time to time in his book and puts a bracingly keen edge on its argument that the dukes and other notables who ...”