“... scale, he could always do one-off travesties – things like his send-up of Reynolds’s Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces. Gillray’s parody was called La Belle Assemblée. In place of the gracious solitary aristocrat, multiple ladies are muscling into line for the sacrifice; among them, as Loxton puts it, ‘the rotund, overstuffed Mrs ...”

“... Very occasionally, on great issues, it may be appropriate, necessary even, for a leader bent on a grand goal to avoid full frankness until he or she judges the time is right, lest premature disclosure of the task in hand makes the ambitious destination that is being sought impossible to reach. On Ireland, so nonsensically counter-productive was the ...”

“... radio programme: that record is held by the Shipping Forecast, at 98, closely followed by The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee since 1925. The format of Desert Island Discs is deeply and reassuringly familiar to its audience, each episode, according to its recent presenter Kirsty Young, ‘a well-tethered hammock’ cradling itself ...”

“... and remained active in radical politics for the next thirty-odd years. At the age of 19 he married Sarah Johnson, his landlady’s daughter, and she brought him enough money to establish himself in Lambeth as a bookseller and stationer. He campaigned among other things for a new, more humane system of poor relief, improvement in the management of lunatic ...”

“... of everything’. He disappeared on a long trip to Egypt with Eleonora Duse, Italy’s answer to Sarah Bernhardt. When he returned, he rarely bothered to show up in Parliament, concentrating on this and other love affairs and on his work. In one of his rare Parliamentary appearances, he suddenly shifted from the extreme right to the far ...”

“... mother left his father, Barr saw the TV footage of Thatcher being pulled from the rubble of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, indestructible as a Cyberman from Doctor Who. Each chapter of the book has a quotation from Thatcher as an epigraph, a device that at first seems intended to provide ironic counterpoint.As his mother descends into drink, Barr gives a ...”

“... happy days’). Her mother, Bedford once said, ‘instilled into me the idea that it was a very grand thing to be a writer … Being brought up to talk about Dostoevsky at breakfast was a great advantage. I owe her an enormous amount.’Sybille Bedford attempted to process the story of her origins in four novels, each a differently disguised autobiography ...”

“... enormous fingers and a mass of greying brown hair that seems made of fine wire. He’s wearing a Sarah Lund sweater and looks as if he’s leaped out of some tough black and white world of chainsmoking and bare light bulbs and bread for supper. His son Alexander is not just young; he seems made of smoother stuff, with a downy beard and gentle eyes. I ask if ...”

“... values and sexual difference are necessarily in harmony. A dissenting view (argued in Sarah Schulman’s The Ties that Bind) is that the family, irrespective of class, is where sexual minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about ...”

“... Hadrianic method to portray her as an enduring mystery, a sphinx: ‘A mix of Flemish peasant and Grand Siècle pedant, Roman emperor and Hindu goddess, Tibetan monk and medieval witch’. In 2037, the letters Yourcenar wrote to Frick as they were falling in love will finally be unsealed, after the fifty years Yourcenar requested have passed. What for now can ...”

“... Ursula’s life resembles John Aspinall’s in certain respects. Each is an eccentric. Each is a grand or smart person, of an equivocal kind. Each of these narratives has a Douglas-Home, and there are some similar fatalities. Aspinall is the son of parted parents, a ‘pseudo-orphan’ who rapidly became larger than life. He is by far the more convivial ...”

“... the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s synagogue. Cut to Jakie performing ‘My Gal Sal’ in a local saloon. The cantor arrives, drags him home by his ear and there, despite Sarah’s ...”

“... such as ‘The Song of the Honey Bee’, written for the short-lived marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, or ‘A Masque for Three Voices’, composed in honour of the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday. Yet even at his worst, as in these lines from the survey of 20th-century history he includes in his tribute to the Queen Mum, one can’t help marvelling ...”

“... endeavours were built on, learned from, and sometimes bore fruit. Historians today tend to avoid grand narratives, rightly recognising them to be beguiling and politically suspect. Weber is out of fashion, and for every area of disenchantment there is a scholar to tell you that it wasn’t that simple, that the world remained enchanted. Keith Thomas’s ...”

“... until he was back in Washington was that he had a judge in mind to perform the task. Her name was Sarah Hughes, a long-time Johnson ally from Dallas whom he had nominated as a federal district judge in 1961, at the start of his vice-presidency. As a Texas appointment he had assumed this was in his gift. But the Justice Department (Bobby’s fiefdom) had told ...”