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“... no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a perception of the activities ...”

“... had the means to lead a very agreeable life, his hard reading interrupted at will by cricket at Lord’s, boating and climbing. When he married, his father increased his allowance, and did so again as each child was born, for he assumed that his son could not do his proper work in the world if he had to earn his own living. He gave Frederic the best ...”

“... remain in the ordinary legal system. In the two influential reports that heralded these changes, Lord Briggs suggested that the online court process might have three stages. First, you, the claimant, would fill in a form online. Pre-populated boxes would help you to clarify the nature of the claim. You would select your opponent: your builder, say, or your ...”

“... the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it rhymes.I picked up Simon Critchley’s On ...”

“... to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone objective, account of one of the most extraordinary lives, in any profession, of this century.’ Holden has a nice line in dry ...”

“... doing, to other people, to people we knew. Then, in the 1997 general election, after I had left home and gone to university in England, Martin McGuinness became our MP. He never could have been my father, of course. Even the words I use betray my upbringing: Derry or Londonderry? Full disclosure might be proper, though it is unusual in writing about ...”

“... mountain and the gantries’, in 1907. The next year his father, a Church of Ireland minister and Home Ruler who refused to sign the Ulster Covenant, was given the parish of St Nicholas in Carrickfergus, where he stayed until 1931, when he was made bishop of Cashel and Waterford. The MacNeices’ relocation north had not been through choice: Louis’s ...”

“... providing, for instance, a definitive list of the pet names used by the family. Nancy was Koko at home, Pauline or Paul to her husband, Susan to her sister Jessica, who was also Susan to her in return. Jessica was always Decca, except when Susan. Deborah was usually Debo, though frequently also Nine (a reference to her supposed mental age) or Tiny Swine ...”

“... with the National Trust’s guides). It’s the sort of book that would look much more at home in a BMW or Mercedes than a Mini. This production breathes an odour of ‘England’s Heritage’: one can imagine it in a bookcase beside works with titles such as ‘Roman Highways of Old Britain’ or ‘Our Cathedral Towns’. That’s a pity, for ...”

“... taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast into the home market as to deprive all at once many thousands of our people of their ordinary employment and means of subsistence.The political reality is surely that the outcome of the tortuous trade wrangles to come will be decided ultimately by voters’ fears rather ...”

“... no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout on Admiralty Road. On the way home from the pictures – the Rosyth Palace, maybe having seen there a naval epic such as The Cruel Sea or Above Us the Waves – I sometimes stood at the bus stop opposite and listened to the drums, trumpet and saxophone, and through the windows saw the shadows ...”

“... Boer War he distinguished himself in some of the hardest fighting, and eventually became ADC to Lord Roberts. Meanwhile, his grandfather had died and he inherited the dukedom. He came home to marry his childhood sweetheart Shelagh Cornwallis-West, and to take on ducal duties and pleasures at Grosvenor House, ‘the finest ...”

“... ironically opens with the self-slaughter of one of the Revolution’s most implacable foes, Lord Castlereagh. And irony holds the key to 19th-century attitudes towards self-destruction. From pulpits down to penny-dreadfuls, Victorian moralists, absolute for improvement, respectability and duty, could not condone the coward’s escape. Hence, as Gates ...”

“... inauguration of the Romanes Lectures in 1892 pales by comparison with the subsequent service of Lord Jenkins as Chancellor of Oxford University. Above all, there is a chasm between Gladstone’s all-encompassing Christian theodicy and Jenkins’s secular, sceptical, post-Freudian outlook. Yet many of their common experiences and career parallels amount to ...”

“... steeds like the generals from battle pictures, sometimes in recognisable stretches of their home territory, but often in front of Classical landscapes that look like the stage-sets for what is, evidently, an aristocratic performance. The notion of equestrian sports as the sports of kings became harder to sustain in the reigns of the first two ...”