“... 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, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mine is Annabel Tent. Nobody guesses it.A joke about the Queen Mother who in an old people’s home finds herself not treated with the proper respect. She approaches a nurse:QM: Don’t you know who I am?Nurse: No, dear, but if you go over and ask the lady at the desk she’ll probably be able to tell you.14 January. Most of the headlines this morning ...”

“... a chosen people, and that the same Providence which, in 1688, had delivered them from Popery at home had also entrusted them with a religious mission to fight their ‘natural enemies’, the agents of the Bishop of Rome across the Channel. This was a mission as attractive and as flattering to Dissenters as it was to Anglicans; and though it did not do away ...”

“... correspondents, Katharine Asquith and Diana Cooper: they seem to fear he might fall over. In his Home Guard uniform Russell resembles the lovable Godfrey of Dad’s Army, so that it is horrid to imagine what a beastly sergeant-major might say to him: ‘Well, well, what have we here? Is it a Womble? Is it Winnie-the-Pooh?’ In fact, Russell was always ...”

“... in Patagonia without a qualm; or at least without being disturbed for doing so when he came home. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language deals primarily with the mutiny of the Bounty, weaving the account in and out of an ethnographical discussion of life aboard men-of-war and of the political and spiritual life of the Polynesians, with great emphasis on their ideas ...”

“... for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would soon ditch his campaign and carry him off to jail. Instead, the irrepressible huckster proposed to take advantage of London’s recently introduced system of ‘red routes’ by establishing a ...”

“... road the wall is made of blackened stone. Beyond it is the cannery. We are walking uphill towards home. This is the geography I have purchase on. I don’t know left or right. This is a steep village and so I just know up from down. I just know there and back, what’s before me and what’s behind. St Charles Borromeo, behind me, is called ‘our ...”

“... the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls whom they have initiated into their rites. Then they extinguish the candles, so that the light shall not be witness to their abominable deeds, and throw themselves lasciviously on the ...”

“... and sublime, his real heartland was – at least on the showing of this exhibition – the Home Counties: Windsor, Virginia Water, Luton Hoo, the country round Basingstoke and round Maidstone, where he produced extensive, undulating panoramas and occluded views of ancient woodland. At Luton, he became fascinated by the beech trees, some of them with ...”

“... high spirits, if less sensible in giving in to them. In due course she was brought from the family home in County Durham to be launched in London. From Seaham Hall, a solid neoclassical house which she always loved, with its views across the terraced gardens to the sea, Annabella was catapulted into Regency London, and a milieu of high taste and low ...”

“... at Kew, and when he was stopped, lay on the ground and refused to budge, having to be carried home on his servants’ shoulders. A few days later, Dr Francis Willis unveiled his new purpose-built restraining chair, which George immediately dubbed my ‘Coronation Chair’. He might have been deprived of his wits, but he never lost his wit. He noted that ...”

“... not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations. Lord Palmerston, however, had less inclination to admire foreign models and none at all to adopt them. ‘Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of Space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and ...”

“... internationalist, addicted to thirty-mile walks in his oldest tweeds, he might have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops ...”

“... into sarcastic black comedy. In English the dialogue, near the end of I.ii, runs thus: Horatio My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. Hamlet I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student; I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. Horatio Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The ...”