“... to use the expensive, matching blue. One of his elegantly-enveloped letters was addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, whose verses Betjeman admired. Betjemann discovered this fact, and felt obliged to explain to his odd and difficult son that his correspondent was a bugger – that is, one of those men who ‘work themselves up into such a state of mutual ...”

“... nature. The hero of the story is a figure barely known except to specialists, a judge named Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, who argued, as against what was to be the dominant English view in the 18th century, that property rights could properly be limited in various cases. The work in which Stair set out his opinions, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland ...”

“... technicality and it was rumoured that young Curzon had been in the picture, the boy’s father, Lord Scarsdale, continued – as did many parents of lesser eminence – to hold O.B. in the highest regard. George himself, on leaving Eton for Balliol, wrote O.B. a long and admirable letter expressing his sense of ‘how good and great an influence’ O.B. had ...”

“... correspondent and was the first Colonial Editor of the Times in the 1890s (she eventually married Lord Lugard, that mighty but unattractive empire-builder). The chapter about appeasement and Munich is written much more in sorrow than in anger, the passions of that moment drained away. The authors rightly observe that the Munich stigma weighed indefinably on ...”

“... argued that he was a true war hero, doing nothing but good with his films, Chaplin was attacked by Lord Northcliffe. ’Charlie Chaplin,’ he wrote, ‘although slightly built, is very firm on his feet, as is evidenced by his screen acrobatics. The way he is able to mount stairs suggests the alacrity with which he would go over the top when the whistle ...”

“... and on industrial democracy and de-centralisation – causes that made little progress under James Callaghan. But while the Liberals are by now convinced of the genuine radicalism of the Four, they are unable to share in the hard-headed determination of the same Social Democratic leaders to exhibit themselves as overjoyed whenever a Labour office-holder ...”

“... economic and cultural mark: they founded Goethe and Schiller societies, became magistrates and Lord Mayors and were the main force behind the formation of the Halle Orchestra. Charles Halle himself was a refugee from revolution, fleeing to England to escape ‘the juggernaut of Republicanism’. Life was much more awkward for the small group who form Dr ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... State by State, the original Constitution and subsequent Amendments? In some respects, as Lord Acton remarked, the Constitution was an effort to avoid settling basic questions. Its provisions were a series of compromises resulting from prolonged sessions of political bargaining, and many clauses did not completely fulfil the purposes of any of the ...”

“... of letters of intimacy of any nature, except for some love-notes to the rather alarmed Brian James, the Australian actor White fell for in 1963. There are no letters to his mother Ruth and none to Manoly, who faithfully burnt them. There are early letters to lovers and ex-lovers, but so many doors are closed to us that our view of the novelist is only ...”

“... accept that migration to the United States can make a Ukrainian an American, surely Windsor and St James can be considered to have Anglicised our monarchy once it had abandoned affection for ‘that despicable Electorate’. A more serious puzzle which he propounds is why it was easier for common nationality to become established in Indonesia than in ...”

“... the need for them, and since 1945 even minority governments have been exceptional. Only one, James Callaghan’s, was based on an agreement with another party, and the collapse of the Lib-Lab Pact brought the end of his administration. The present government is unique in being a peacetime coalition of two complete parties based on a negotiated ...”

“... Trevelyan: ‘I think that, in the end, I shall go to Trevelyan’s enemies, Hilaire Belloc or Lord Acton, both Catholics, for an understanding of modern England.’ Belloc wrote no autobiography: he felt it was not really a gentlemanly thing to do; autobiographers usually offered too little or far too much. His now hackneyed and rather inferior quip ...”

“... were conducting what is now called ‘pre-emptive defence’. Almost the first question the future Lord Carver asked me when he came to visit my company was how I persuaded my riflemen that it was right for them to violate an international frontier. The ‘party line’, which came into play if we had a casualty across the border, was that we had been there ...”

“... suchlike sorry political rhetoric). A grown-up reading of Samson a few years ago (the same King James Version that is offered at the beginning of Grossman’s translated essay) left me initially bewildered and remembering a large, blandly handsome boy of very little brain at school who, when I was 11, was my first boyfriend for about three weeks before he ...”