“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to join her husband in the safety of London. It was not forthcoming, and in July 1643, her home, Brampton Bryan Castle, was besieged. Lady Harley held out valiantly until the siege was lifted several weeks later, but never saw her husband or son again. In her last letter, she told her son she had ‘taken a very greate coold’, and hoped that God ...”

“... death, struck down by a cricket ball. Cranborne, for his part, was a Cecil. His grandfather, Lord Salisbury, had, while prime minister, made his son Jim (Cranborne’s father) a minister – a piece of nepotism no other family would have contemplated. Cranborne was a lazy, hopeless student at Eton and Christ Church, where his set consisted exclusively of ...”

“... is not much disagreement: in fact, as between Inglis and Tucker, there is mainly disagreement on Lord of the Rings, which for Inglis is schmaltz (Götterdämmerung for the fascistically-minded dispossessed), and for Tucker a valuable myth giving meaning to individual fantasies of achievement. On how books – good books – work, Inglis is bold and clear. He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... claimed to have found in the State Paper Office. In fact, the association of the company – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – with the Blackfriars did not begin till 1609, and this document of 1596, which lists Shakespeare among the petitioners, seemed to establish his place among the seniors of the company some years earlier than had been believed. But the ...”

“... anywhere else, not in the pub or the street, unless they were godly people who read the Bible at home, in William Tyndale’s translation, which practically invented what we regard as standard 16th-century-speak. The most we can claim for Tyndale, and for Cranmer, is that Bibles and Prayer Books made more extensive the bilingualism which the gentry had ...”

“... Have you read any good books lately? Oh and by the way, how is your sex life? According to Daniel Lord Smail activities like these are the true drivers of history. Forget great men with great ideas, the march of progress or the ‘seeds of change’: the essence of the historical process is the manipulation of human chemistry by the substances we consume, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”