“... white wine are ‘poofters’ and believed, according to the paper’s literary editor Graham Lord, ‘that Aids was a fair punishment for buggery’. According to a memoir written by Junor’s daughter, Penny, the great editor and columnist bullied his wife and children while proclaiming the family values that made him such a darling of the right. Fleet ...”

“... often as I handled the bread and wine in the mass, that they were not the flesh and blood of the Lord’). Continually persecuted and forced to migrate, his followers split into many smaller groups; according to a survey conducted by the Mennonite World Conference in 2015, there are now more than 2.1 million Mennonites living in 87 countries. Beyond beliefs ...”

“... to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely got away from ...”

“... like it to be different for Iris,’ he wrote in his last letter to his wife. ‘Make a home for her and yourself, all this travelling and homelessness is so bad for you and will be bad for her.’ Yet when Sybil Cutting rented the Villa Medici in Fiesole, she was not exactly submerging herself and her daughter in authentic Italian life. They joined ...”

“... heat, dust and beggars. It isn’t marked on the map but it was there that I found Rifat, at the home of Khalid Mehmood, the illiterate factory worker she had been forced to marry. Behind the mud-baked walls and through the steel door of a flat-roofed house women were gathered round a fly-plagued courtyard: here, in purdah, they had discarded their ...”

“... said that the most terrible moment of her life had been finding herself alone at breakfast with Lord Salisbury, and unable to think of anything to talk about except jam. Yet the more Jenkins tells us of this first Constance, the more we see that being an aristocratic nerve-wracked Victorian spinster was actually the ideal training for becoming an Edwardian ...”

“... killed just outside the coverts – about 11 o’clock Venetia [Stanley] – I were just going home when the hounds got away after a big cub (I believe it was an old fox!) – we had a glorious run for about half an hour. She is always going away to recover from a series of ailments, including tonsillitis, bronchitis, lumbago and blood poisoning, and her ...”

“... been lost at sea. Of the almost two thousand men who had embarked on his expedition, 188 returned home with him.The smallest of the warships accompanying Anson had been HMS Wager, a broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the ...”

“... More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and very tragic figure of an artist born into an age devoid of artistic standards’.Given that ‘very tragic’ plight, it may not be surprising that Waugh began his study with the observation that ‘there is singularly little fun to be ...”

“... in writing plays again. Maybe it’ll be the start of a new romance. Dusk falls. Attercliffe goes home to his ‘four-bedroomed, one bathroomed, one living-roomed (dining-annexed), one-kitchened “executive” dwelling’ at 24 Walton Lane on the outskirts of Morristown. Through the window he sees Elise his eldest daughter washing her hair in the kitchen ...”

“... gondolier. With Hartleian cunning she dissembles this passion, writing to her close friend back home that she has met a lady called Simonetta Perkins who is in the same predicament, and what advice should she be given? The comedy is delicate and poignant too, with an anti-climactic climax of droll simplicity. Minor characters are masterfully etched, in ...”

“... to be thinking of literary critics, not grapepickers or hairdressers. The good news is that the Home Counties view of literature has now been decisively despatched. The native of the Southern hemisphere no longer appears in Anglo-Saxon culture only through the sights of a rifle or at the end of a sherry decanter. E.M. Forster had it both ways, allowing his ...”

“... applause at the bill’s passing, she hurried off to break the news to Fawcett, who was waiting at home by the fire in her dressing gown, and in her elation, drove her car straight into a police officer. Ray Strachey (in the driver’s seat) with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, her daughter Philippa and sister Agnes on 2 July 1928. The Cause, though not a ...”

“... its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It was while walking home with a student one evening that [Wallace] Stevens ... spoke of his recent poem, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a ...”

“... sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ France’s English contemporary Lord Justice Mathew made the point in more genteel terms: ‘In England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz.’ The Early Victorian poet Thomas Love Peacock had noted the unequal impact of the Sunday observance laws: The poor man’s sins are ...”