“... 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 ...”

“... and pliant imperial officials, he ensured they were invested in his success. Worried that Home Rule for Ireland might unravel the British Empire, he paid Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rulers ten thousand pounds in cash to guarantee they would support the principle of Irish – and by extension settler-colonial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gold coins, was also a compulsive gambler, and needed to pass the fever on. He is recalled coming home from a disastrous night at his club, bursting into the bathroom, and challenging his son to flip for half a dollar, then double or nothing, then raising the ante, then double or nothing, and so on till Budd was a fortune out of pocket. ‘When I looked up at ...”

“... good grace to a lank-haired whizz, And from the Crucible, their battlefield, Nobody needs to go home on a shield. But now on Friday, 21st of May We hear what happens in a proper fight. Eight thousand miles south in San Carlos Bay The invasion has been going on all night. Men on both sides have really died today. The bridgehead’s been wide open since ...”

“... ashes, to get the solder that had melted into small lumps. We put these into a bag and took them home. When we had enough Aunt Alice would melt them in an iron pot. Then she would wet a small piece of level ground, make impressions in the damp soil to the size of a stick of solder, and pour the melted solder into them. When the solder cooled she used to wash ...”

“... would never happen. He’d died without that consolation. But for the others, the retirement home villains, dog love justifies everything. Reg and Ron never recovered from premature exposure to Lassie Come Home. It blighted their emotional development. It helped to formulate the lodge rules for survival in the dance ...”

“... was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the night was over,’ he writes, ‘people jumped in the pool in ...”

“... public intellectual is critical of government penal policy (which is more than likely), would the Home Office be a friendly user? Probably not. She might try to contribute to ‘culture’ but the document, not surprisingly, gives no examples of what this might involve. In any case, all of this is camouflage. What Hefce (or its political master) really wants ...”