“... It took him through the war, and it played a part in my coming to be. My mother, Constance Mary Baker, was born on 9 March 1891 in 44 Gordon Square, the illegitimate daughter of William Henry Baker, who had a highly profitable career as a speculative builder of the vast rambling pubs that made late Victorian London a city ...”

“... returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour ...”

“... and enterprising, and are themselves a study in social and geographical mobility. His brother George Marsh rose from a humble navy clerkship to occupy the position once held by Samuel Pepys. In 1755 he secured for Milbourne a senior administrative post at the port of Mahón in Minorca. It was a huge rise in status and income. Once on the island, Elizabeth ...”

“... seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says ...”

“... every time I saw the word ‘Golf’. (I urge you not to surrender to this weakness, as George Bush is said to have done.) Reminders of the outcome of that unpleasantness are everywhere, most noticeably in the omnipresence of the Syrians who seized the chance occasioned by their participation in the all-annealing Desert Storm to legitimise then ...”

“... village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France profonde based on the region, though writing the railway out and standardising her peasant characters’ French to make it comprehensible. The ...”

“... few individuals are more conservative than those who have made it from the bottom to the top. George Canning, the son of a radical barrister and a promiscuous actress, seems to have flirted with Jacobinism before becoming the Tories’ most pungent speaker and ultimately prime minister. The legal abilities of John Scott, son of a Newcastle ...”

“... On the evening of 26 April 1937, George Lowther Steer, a correspondent for the Times, was having dinner with other reporters at the Torrontegui Hotel in Bilbao. Sometime after nine, a distraught Basque official rushed into the dining-room: ‘Guernica is destroyed,’ he told them. The town was still burning when the journalists got there ...”

“... and tie. She was now in the orbit of Harland’s contributors and John Lane’s Keynotes – ‘George Etherton’, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and the languid but sharp-witted Ella D’Arcy. These young women were not Bohemians: they were dandies. They objected when Frederick Rolfe left lice on the furniture; Beardsley was ‘a dear boy’ to them. At the ...”

“... funeral, or of the Coronation, rivals Horace Walpole’s description of the obsequies of George II. ‘Chamberlain was very dapper indeed, George Curzon looks well again, Ritchie looks the wickedest of the human race ... as if writhing under a load of disreputable guilt ... I forgot to mention the sight of ...”

“... in Nicaragua. The elder Bush later renominated him and got him through. Gates would have struck George H.W. Bush as a sound appointment because he knew the secrets and could be trusted to keep them. When the younger Bush, after the 2006 election, brought in Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld at defence, he would have had in mind that history of loyalty to the ...”

“... to both. The same stretch of line had already worked its magic on two of the main characters in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), who both get on the train, as Kate Croy was to do, at Sloane Square. Adopting ‘an intimate tone, though one that was quite conventional’, Everard Barfoot flirts with the safely married Monica Widdowson by expressing ...”

“... This again is not new. In 1916, when anti-German feeling was at its height, a man called Sir George Makgill obtained leave to seek orders barring two citizens of German extraction, Sir Edgar Speyer and Sir Ernest Cassel, from remaining in office as Privy Counsellors. What is interesting about the case is not that he lost but that both the Divisional ...”

“... proportion of white male Republican voters typically reaches landslide proportions, as it did for George W. Bush. Before Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone to the White House. Losing its ...”

“... of Table Mountain, symbolised his conversion to the values of the Dutch. He hired Herbert Baker to plan an austere refurbishment; the house was filled with the teak furniture of the early Dutch. One Boer visitor watched an irate Rhodes kick an African stable lad’s behind and concluded that he was now one of them. But there was an ill omen about the ...”