“... view, a certain kind of ‘civilised’ (i.e. liberal) ideal has been replaced by its opposite – John Stuart Mill has turned into the Ayatollah. If Russell’s subtle consideration of disagreement was replaced by vacuous dogmatism, as Monk asserts it was – and everything he quotes in this book supports this contention – it may say as much about the ...”

“... to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other ...”

“... John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell article’, in which he criticised ‘a large part of the British Left’ for its opposition to the war in Iraq, described the Statesman as ‘a sort of upmarket version of the Daily Mirror’, and concluded that because ‘the NS believes that Blair and the US are the problem, not the solution,’ it was ‘time to recognise that Blairites like me should not appear regularly in its pages ...”

“... to his serviced chambers and the joys of independence. Nearby, a worthy Anglican cleric-to-be, John Egerton, was lodging in Lincoln’s Inn. He furnished his rooms with a rug, bureau, clock and piano, only to find that he had seemingly mislaid his fine and valuable linen sheets. After months of wrangling he became convinced that his housekeeper had stolen ...”

“... Cret, chair of the steering group of the American Battle Monuments Committee, told the architect, John Russell Pope, in 1925: ‘This is the most important monument and for this reason it has been entrusted to you.’ Pope was one of the most successful and visible American architects of the era – he designed the National Gallery in Washington, the ...”

“... the limp too, are long-standing: at art school, for no reason she understood at the time, she took up drawing feet. One such drawing is included in the catalogue: it shows three deformed feet labelled as belonging to Oedipus (of the swollen foot), Byron (with his club foot) and ‘Bootsy’ (a family friend, and Antigone’s godfather, nicknamed for the ...”

“... Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old and affectionate one: they had met in Italy in 1848. William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor of ability ...”

“... a pair of divine twins in the form of horses. This myth has survived in some unlikely places. John Aubrey ascribed the Uffington White Horse to the brothers, though more recent archaeologists have dated it even earlier, to the Bronze Age. In Lower Saxony, the horse-head gables featured on many farmhouses were still referred to as ‘Hengst und Hors’ as ...”

“... Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare. In 1928, with the pedal-powered radio ...”

“... he hadn’t counted on how little one congressman (out of 435) could do. The speaker of the House, John Boehner, set the agenda, and Meadows was expected to do what he was told. ‘Boehner had “enforcers”, not unlike a Mafia don. If you didn’t vote how he wanted, these enforcers – most notably his leadership team – would ban you from congressional ...”

“... Three episodes, three wars: The Allied armies took possession of Tientsin and Peking and the adjoining districts. At first many of the soldiers of the composite body acted in a brutal and licentious way. Men, women and children were outraged and murdered and cities looted ... Some foreigners came to the captured districts for loot: a most disgraceful episode ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”

“... the cruelties he had seen? Conrad’s biographer Frederick Karl is unsure when this visit took place, but if we are to believe Casement’s Black Diary – and Angus Mitchell, who has edited The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, thinks that we should not – it took place on 3 January 1904 and lasted only one ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians ...”

“... already ireful coloured persons gets to hear the ITV soundtrack on which the following exchange took place. Commentator: ‘The Cameroon goalkeeper learned his trade from the great German, Sepp Meier, and that is why he wears those black track-suit trousers. Meier gave them to him.’ Expert (chuckling): ‘I didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit ...”