“... 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 ...”

“... secured, it was hoped, Russian influence in this key buffer region would be stymied. Planned by Lord Auckland, and facilitated by the spying of the handsome Great Gamer Alexander Burnes, the war was fabulously simple in conception. The British would assemble a vast expeditionary force, and march on Kabul. By the time it began its ponderous progress into ...”

“... Through​ a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political consequences of the result – the tenor of a Theresa May government, the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn – and lawyers have been called on to consider the status of the referendum vote and the technicalities involved in triggering Article 50 ...”

“... The James painting was worked on over the summers of 1910 and 1911, at Hill House, the Epping home of the hostess and patron Mary Hunter. She was the wife of a coal baron and said it was her ‘sacred duty’ to spend all her husband’s money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent ...”

“... nodded again. He seemed patiently puzzled, stupefied by his misfortunes. He explained that his home was a square of mat upon a terrace, the balcony of a hotel belonging to a rapacious landlord who let him sleep there for an exorbitant sum. No, he was not married. For who would marry Gokhale with his prospects? And where would he live with his wife? In a ...”

“... of confusion, mixture, indiscriminacy. Corinna, the unfaithful mistress, who comes ‘spewing home/Drencht with the Seed of half the Town’, is an emblem of promiscuity in more than one sense.Rochester​ ran risks with his satires. Over Christmas in 1673, by accident and probably while drunk, he handed the king a copy of his lampoon about pricks and ...”

“... more that ‘the centre of gravity of that exploitation has shifted … to peripheral workers, home workers, ad hoc workers,’ not to mention the ‘greater immiseration and exploitation’ of ‘the massed-up workers of the Third World’.‘There was no attempt on the part of Marxism Today to rethink society from the ground up in terms of Marxist ...”