“... it might have been: Ned Sherrin on Caryl Brahms, for example, or Hugh Johnson on his publisher, James Mitchell: ‘The World Atlas of Wines,’ Johnson writes, ‘became the most discussed and most imitated reference book of the Seventies among rival publishers. By the end of the decade it had sold one million copies.’ It is also noticeable that ...”

“... Minister for Defence Procurement) as fodder for their own inspired gossip and intrigue. When Lord Young first threatened to become Secretary of State for Employment, Clark and Aitken leaked the story to the FT, thus hoping, to do the new Secretary down. When Young got the job nevertheless, Clark, needless to say, took to him at once When there was ...”

“... is to me’ after seeing a lady on a beach, and perhaps to get over it he swam for miles up the James river against the tide. Pushkin, characteristically, took a more down-to-earth view of girls in rivers. When a friend objected that in his Byronic poem ‘The Captive of the Caucasus’ it was decidedly ungallant of the Russian officer not to attempt to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we should express no opinion on this issue, and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction. Even as the latest in ‘smart’ technology grinds and punctures the Iraqi military, this amazingly explicit enticement to Saddam is still being debated. Did the United States intend ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... presence described Siraj and his nobles as ‘crafty, devious and venal’. In 1817, however, James Mill, in his History of British India, deplored the ‘plotting and intrigue’ that deposed the nawab, and subsequently, in a gesture of reconciliation, an obelisk put up by Holwell to commemorate the deaths was removed. But by the 1840s the mood had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the passage of time. (‘Thank God and every other god there is/That time is an aesthete,’ Clive James wrote in response to this ‘polychromatic crap’.) In the 18th and 19th centuries, statues were routinely ‘restored’ with sulphuric acid. And in the late 1930s, as if more than two thousand years of weathering hadn’t been enough, the Parthenon ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”