“... In Joe’s family in the interwar years, underwear was unheard of: no wonder the rich said that the working class stank. In almost every paragraph the authentic banalities of the British working class stumble through: for a childhood misdemeanour Joe and his pals ‘got a proper ticking-off’; in his household ‘literally every penny ...”

“... it must have been cooking for the British royal family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered ...”

“... Certainly it doesn’t figure largely in the fiction of James himself, of which it might be said, along with Gertrude Stein on the subject of her home town, Oakland, California: ‘There is no “There” there.’ The other topic snaking its way through these pages is war. Before rushing to judgment, one should recall that there was a time when war ...”

“... Lewis is steeped in Goldziher. The names of both Wellhausen and Goldziher were dropped in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), but neither is discussed in that eccentric, erratic and substantially misleading book. Instead, Said preferred to concentrate on writers like Sir Richard Burton, Lord ...”

“... as historians call him nowadays. The others are Ed, which could mean ‘riches’ or be short for Edward; Til, which could mean ‘good’ or be short for a name like Tilwine; and Bera, which is hard to relate to any known Anglo-Saxon name but means ‘bear’ in Old English. Each of the four arm-rings has been ‘treated in a distinctive way, which ...”

“... shoes. They were never able afterwards to identify which course it had been. Detailed to cover Edward VIII’s exit from the country after the Abdication, he attended a dance in Folkestone in white tie and tails, slipping off every now and again in a chauffeur-driven car provided by the Post to check whether the ex-king was leaving via the nearby Lympne ...”

“... exhibited an ‘unmistakable relish for comedy or psychiatric freak show’. Isabel Sprout was said to believe that ‘she was empress of the whole world, except the East Indies, which was too hot,’ and the commissioner got her to say as much at the outset of the proceedings. But Suzuki argues convincingly that we should not dismiss the commissions as ...”

“... his Polish mistress Madame Hanska. Custine married in 1821, but began a lifelong relationship with Edward de Sainte-Barbe shortly afterwards. His sexuality had long been public knowledge, but in 1824, after arranging a tryst with a soldier in Epinay, he was set upon by several cavalry officers. He seems to have seen the incident – and the attendant publicity ...”

“... and charismatic figure expounded was the value of fables. Which kind of fable, Apollonius is said to have asked his companions, is the more philosophical: the kind found in the poets, or Aesop’s? His respondent, one Menippus, replied: the poetic kind, of course. There is no value in Aesop, just ‘frogs and donkeys and rubbish for old women and ...”

“... mentioned ‘the gaslight phenomenon’ in the late 1960s. In 1981, two doctors, Victor Calef and Edward Weinshel, gave an account of gaslighting in Psychoanalytic Quarterly: the ‘victimiser’, they wrote, tries ‘to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy, and the victim more or less complies’. As Kate Abramson explains in her new book, On ...”

“... frustrates the mind that wants social fictions or biographical revelations. This needs to be said in order to clear the ground for Vendler’s brilliantly focused way of reading the Sonnets. but these lyrics do not seek to shake off the dirt of the public world – often they wish they could, but the ugly dangerousness in the youth’s personality and in ...”

“... whole being dissolve in love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently ...”

“... at Fettes remembered him as a consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ‘almost music-hall style of speaking’, while his son greatly admired the music-hall comic Dan Leno and would sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb ...”

“... the importance of the issues at stake. ‘Keith should have become Prime Minister,’ Thatcher said at his memorial service. ‘So many of us felt that was his destiny.’ He himself was engagingly frank in discounting this scenario, saying that ‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’ Certainly, he never looked back with any ...”

“... downturn, 364 academic economists signed a letter to the Times. ‘The time has come,’ it said, ‘to reject monetarist policies,’ since ‘there is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby induce an automatic recovery in ...”