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“... space’ on a moonlit night in Naples, is joined on the page by an English grazier, ‘treading home from an evening’s merriment’. ‘Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars,’ he exclaims. To which his companion replies: ‘With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.’ In the dark, ghosts walked. Travel was ...”

“... legal battles; some are reassessing the limits of public interest and the parameters of reporting. Lord Leveson proposed significantly limiting the scope of the exemption for journalism and giving the information commissioner stronger enforcement powers. Conducted in the long wake of his inquiry, the passage through Parliament of the new Data Protection Act ...”

“... and white, with contrasting black-patinated bronzes. By chance an inventory of the contents of Lord Hertford’s villa in Regent’s Park survives which closely corresponds, although without the alarming carnal epithet. Other sources confirm his account of the extraordinary Chinese dairy at Woburn, approached through massed azaleas and rhododendrons, and ...”

“... straight from the motif, with both the painter and Effie – his model – shivering in a stately-home bedroom on a December night.) No redundant symbolising dogs the brushwork here. ‘A cursive mode of painting, almost disdainful in its certitude, which rapidly envelops forms, seeking only their accent and wanting to extinguish at a blow the general ...”

“... a commodity in the saleroom, which it could never have afforded. Any publisher looking for a good home for his firm’s archive would be impressed by what the National Library of Scotland has done with the Blackwood papers, presented to it in 1942. The NLS has been similarly conscientious in its stewardship of the Constable, Oliver and Boyd, and Smith, Elder ...”

“... Eleanor and her daughter Marie of Champagne, give their verdicts. In one decision, coming close to home, Eleanor criticises a lady who wishes to stay with her lover even after he has discovered their kinship. A woman who ‘seeks to preserve an incestuous love’, she warns, ‘is going against what is right and proper’.Did courts of love exist? For many ...”

“... given to swooning when his problems press, Colin falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the lord who lives on the hill (soon to be developed – to the lord’s profit – into a housing estate). One track of the story is the comedy of Colin’s adventures with a sharply-observed set of upper-class twits and the ...”

“... nervous, fifty-cigarettes-a-day daughter Gwendolen, also her father’s biographer, entitled ‘Lord Salisbury in Private Life’, the political a priori of the refurbished Tory intellectual can be revealed. The third Marquis’s contribution to the politics of the future was a loathing for the mass of the human race, and especially for their political ...”

“... the love of flowers, the porcelain, bronzes and calligraphy. Footbinding kept women chastely at home, while the arduous labour of mastering the language discouraged young men from getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, and other delinquencies lamented by Shakespeare’s Old Shepherd. Even the Chinese mode of consuming alcohol was so well ...”

“... a landslide victory and fully aware of the potency of the Falklands factor, Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and ...”

“... period. In his foreword to Hidden Weapons, Professor R.V. Jones recalls expressing disquiet to Lord Vansittart that MI6 was recruited on the basis of friendship rather than competence. Vansittart agreed, but added that the pay was so bad it was only your friends you could persuade to take the job. Ironically, Kim Philby was initially discouraged from ...”

“... make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the metropolis.’ It would seem, too, that the ...”

“... refers to his brother throughout as ‘Charles’, and it is time to reveal that he was known at home as Percy, and Percy he remained for the first 45 years, ‘distant relatives’ so addressing him even after that. For the world in which he was rising ‘Snow’ was enough – surnames were, after all, then the common form of address. To call him ...”

“... by no means indifferent and maintained a personal team of economists and statisticians, headed by Lord Cherwell, to advise him on economic issues. Questions like rationing and the extent of government controls awoke in his breast a fear of creeping socialism. It would have been interesting to learn more of Churchill’s thinking in these areas, but Gilbert ...”

“... Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ladders merely to catch a glimpse of the great Frenchman through the windows of university halls, and Parisian society figures sent ...”