“... in artists as he was in art, and met many examples of the species in Soho clubs. Being at home with painters and intellectuals considerably his seniors seems to have come naturally to him, and soon we find him in Paris on familiar terms with Michel and Louise Leiris, Jacques Lacan, Sylvia Bataille, André Masson and Alberto Giacometti, the last of ...”

“... off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a dreadful feeling to use violence against a people in real and absolute ...”

“... something to do with imprisonment, torture and forced labour? One might even wonder whether, back home, Prospero will experience the uneasy notion that he’s never actually been to a desert island at all: that the redemptive colonial fantasy has been played out in his own civilised brain. Just as bewildering is finding civilisation where you weren’t ...”

“... cause. Wondering what had happened to her holiday, his wife said goodbye to Berlin and returned home. Above all, these letters provide a stunning social history of the boom and bust economy of the early Victorian age. As a young man Cobden made a lot of money, and even by the tigerish standards of the day made it very quickly. By the time he was 32 he was a ...”

“... brushing a fly away from her sleeping baby’. And Hera, after quarrelling with Zeus, runs back home to Olympus like an idea that flashes in the mind of a man who has travelled far and wide, and thinks in his mind’s awareness, ‘I wish I were in that place, or this,’ and imagines many things; so swiftly travelled Hera in her haste, a goddess. The ...”

“... mag. One man decided to christen my Dad Mar Rupertus – ‘Mar’, he said, was Persian for Lord. (He called his cat Mar Pluto too.) I always liked my father’s weird parcels – strange stamps and seals and semi-papal bulls, the family trees of those descended from Avignon popes (all covered in gold leaf), an altar-cloth depicting all Christ’s ...”

“... 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 ...”