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“... that Douglas Hogg claimed for cleaning out his moat. The papers are suddenly full of pictures of Home Counties mansions set in acres of manicured lawns, straight out of Country Life, allegedly maintained at taxpayers’ expense. Proof, in case anyone has forgotten, that the class divide is alive and well. A reporter from the BBC has even had fun touring the ...”

“... earlier the pulling down of a mosque, said to have been built on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram, had led to the worst communal violence in India since Partition. The facts, as so often, are disputed, but it seems that a large crowd threw stones at the train, four carriages were set on fire, and 59 people, 12 of them children, burned to death. Over ...”

“... was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in August 1900, the youngest daughter and ninth of ten children of Lord and Lady Glamis. When she was four her father inherited the earldom of Strathmore and she became Lady Elizabeth. The Strathmores had houses in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II ...”

“... finds herself in a brothel. She finds kindness on the street and abuse in the highest places. The lord high almoner, Bishop Sherlock, ‘fat and carbuncled, his face “all Knobs and Flames of Fire”’, rejects her plea for royal charity, calling her a foreigner (a claim she disputes, retorting that Ireland was ‘equally a Part of his Majesty’s Dominions ...”

“... after day he waited with all the other animals and dolls for somebody to come along and take him home.’ No one seems interested, until ‘one morning a little girl stopped and looked straight into Corduroy’s bright eyes.’ ‘Look!’ Lisa says. ‘There’s the very bear I’ve always wanted.’ But her mother replies ‘not today, dear,’ and points ...”

“... at least, who aren’t trying to enter the US illegally – are packing their bags and going home. In the southern and south-eastern parts of the city, you can see it with your own eyes. Beyond the first cotton fields, the American Wall bars the horizon, a reminder that something does lie beyond all this misery, but something inaccessible. You leave the ...”

“... keels of the world’s liners and battleships. Ettore had perfect German and reasonable French; at home he and his family spoke Triestine dialect, while his ambition had always been to live in Florence and become a native speaker of lingua Toscana, the true Italian. His command of English was not good, although he and his wife visited London two or three times ...”

“... It took nerve and courage and immense self-confidence (Breen likens it to virtu) to become ‘a lord of the soil’ – that is to say, to get a good price and, equally important, to be respected for the quality of his leaf. Good management signified ‘private virtue’: to criticise a planter’s tobacco was almost tantamount to impugning his ...”

“... itself to total surrender in Ireland is captured in this book. The much-abused reactionary Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks, whom no one ever accused of a lack of patriotism, is quoted as saying in 1925 that ‘Englishmen including himself were tired of paying money to Irishmen.’ Austen Chamberlain, more explicitly, denounced Northern Ireland as ...”

“... our industry. Sir Roy Harrod, to his great honour, was writing about it already in the Fifties; Lord Kaldor took up the theme in the Sixties; and the Cambridge Economic Policy Group has followed on, with increasing desperation, throughout the Seventies. For growth to be sustainable, it is essential that the management of domestic demand be complemented by ...”

“... media, and some pretty strange ideas about how they should be made to live. We have recently seen Lord Scarman poking about like some wise old lizard in the smashed sitting-rooms of Railton Road. Three years ago, Richard Clutterbuck asked this judicial veteran of Grunwick and Red Lion Square what he thought would be the likeliest causes of political violence ...”

“... was precluded from ever asking for a divorce. In this ‘dreary, wasted period’ of his life, his home hopelessly broken up, Lewes first came to know Marian Evans, who was living in the Strand earning at the age of 33 a meagre livelihood editing the Westminster Review. At first she was repelled by his flippant cynicism, until she realised that it was only a ...”

“... writes in Laughing Torso. ‘She was very beautiful and had a wonderful deep voice. I used to go home and attempt to lower my voice too. I think I succeeded to a certain extent after some practice.’ Bell’s impression of Hamnett was less favourable. In a letter to her husband, she describes a morning spent listening to Hamnett’s ‘appallingly sordid ...”

“... about her. She was American but had lived in Germany for years, though not in Berlin, the usual home of American artists in exile. Her novel had an opening sentence that would make an MFA instructor proud, even as it seemed to parody MFA style: ‘I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.’ The miscarriage ...”

“... years for falsely accusing a number of senior figures of abusing children. ‘Never again,’ said Lord Bramall, a former chief of the defence staff, one of those falsely accused, ‘should the presumption of innocence be reversed on the say-so of one person and for the convenience of one organisation.’ But the case against Epstein and his friends is based ...”