“... The​ vast majority of those who worked in service never set foot in a stately home. The country house, with its uniformed staff and rigid hierarchy, looms large in the British imagination, but the experience of service in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was far more mundane and far more various. Most servant-keeping households employed only a cook and a maid or a single maid-of-all-work or ‘general ...”

“... them) lining the grand staircase. A naked baby appears as a symbol of contemporary art: at the foot of the stairs, a photographer (George Platt Lynes) zaps the scribbling infant with flashbulbs; on the balcony labelled ‘Museum of Modern Art’, the baby plays hopscotch on a Mondrian, surrounded by Picassos; and at the top of the stairs, the Met’s ...”

“... beloved of today’s builders. During the Gezi protests, I noticed a teenager rubbing with his foot the meringue façade of a mall which covered what once had been a perfectly beautiful hundred-year-old building. He kicked it and some of the white stuff broke off, like dried icing sugar from a gingerbread house. What is Erdogan doing? It’s easy to hate ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind ...”

“... and physical ties on the other. Or the Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that ...”

“... means ‘spleen’), and a group of trainee doctors in white smocks. Examining the chart at the foot of my bed, Milza would ask me: ‘And how is our Englishman today?’ Questions designed to gauge my mental alertness met with little success. In English I was asked: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ I was in two minds about that. ‘I fell – or else I ...”

“... into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak ...”

“... to the defence of the threatened mainstream, which sounds a bit like a call to defend Elton John or MTV. Either Paterson’s mainstream poets were not as middle of the road as his name for them suggested, or the threat levels were being artificially hiked up. The Iraq invasion was taking place at the time and angry avant-gardists quickly drew the ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... remained unpublished until 1534. It caused outrage among keen Arthurians, as shown for instance by John Leland’s furious Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae of 1544, in which he insisted that the whole Arthurian legend was absolutely true, listed the 149 knights of the Round Table to prove it, wrote Polydore off as a damn ...”

“... inflicting great damage on the economy. Yet politically, the Major government was bound hand and foot to its existing policy – and Labour’s only criticism was that the policy did not go far enough. That was the position at the time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in ...”

“... to rationalise. Two examples of dissent are given in Thomas Blass’s book. One man puts his foot down at 135 volts: EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires that you go on, teacher. Go on, please. SUBJECT: But if you don’t mind, I’d like to see him myself before I do go on. EXPERIMENTER: . . . It’s absolutely essential that you ...”