“... seems to have had some sympathy with the more moderate forms of worship advocated by Bishop John Williams. Herrick could play with the language of Catholic worship, satirise Puritans who used long hair to hide ears that had been cropped as a punishment for their writings, and criticise kings who extorted money from their subjects. He was not simply drawn ...”

“... three children, it was the only one who was immune to these emotions who inherited the throne. Elizabeth of Bohemia could well have become the focus for some of the aspirations centred on Prince Henry, yet Charles could not. How far Charles, like Harold Wilson, was handicapped by a ‘lost leader’ myth around him is a question to which the answer is not ...”

“... in Paternoster Square. One by one or in neatly opposed couples – Ken Clarke and Shirley Williams, say – funeral attendees were interrogated about the legacy. Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of local stereotypes have been assembled, some of them (like Dave and Samantha Cameron) quite obviously having a good time, with smiles and ...”

“... prairie populism of the turn of the century was still an animating inspiration. Arthur Senior and Elizabeth Schlesinger believed in the political necessity of an educated citizenry and a muscular government that could restrain the market. State education was an article of faith. When the family moved from Ohio to Massachusetts for Arthur Senior to take up a ...”

“... voice) no different from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi is here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay A., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris, who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You ...”

“... Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the overwhelming feeling.24 February. Watching Dad’s ...”

“... King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on ...”

“... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too ...”

“... common, sealed coffins sometimes exploded’ because of it. There is a story that the corpse of Elizabeth I – retained for more than a month before burial – blew up, shattering the wooden coffin and lead sarcophagus in which it was being kept. (The story was itself political dynamite, and her courtiers evidently tried to keep it secret, while Papists ...”

“... After the barked didacticism of Gang of Four and Wire, how about the dissolving beauty of Elizabeth Fraser’s glossolalia or the translucent head voice of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell? In place of funky basslines, there were the painterly smears of Shields’s open-tuned guitar. Instead of syncopated drums, there was Spacemen 3’s metronome looping ...”

“... like a dream roster, an all-time heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing ...”

“... over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s 80th birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with everyone Jocelyn has known or worked ...”

“... crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book ...”

“... complaining that ‘news management’ had become ‘news invention’. Even the young Queen Elizabeth was moved to remark to her press secretary: ‘I think the basic dishonesty of the whole thing was a trouble.’ Now, 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the story up to ...”

“... She has also had his tapestries displayed against light oatmeal fabric on the walls of the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in order to devise a setting where the ‘right solutions for Europe’ might be found. Fuller’s declaration that Europe and America have much to learn from us was published in the Salisbury Review in 1987 and then republished in ...”