“... came about because my father thought that, at least for a matter as serious as birth, there was no reliable doctor outside London. Indeed it was only for us, us English as he must have thought of us, my mother, my brother and me, that an English doctor would do at all. For himself, until history put a stop to it, he always went to Berlin to see his ...”

“... She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of ...”

“... Head teachers disappear, pushed out by angry governors, and silenced by compromise agreements, so no one can talk openly about what went wrong: one union rep I talked to reckons these deals cost the public between £10,000 and £20,000 a time; in his local authority alone he thinks that £250,000 a year of public money is spent this way. Schools judged Grade ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John Singer Sargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting ...”

“... who had never much liked Mosley, consoled herself with the thought that ‘she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands.’ (Mosley was always known as ‘Tom’ just as Cynthia was known as ‘Cimmie’.) Mosley himself, in his autobiography, described his marriage to Cimmie as ‘an event in my life of outstanding happiness’ – which leaves open the ...”

“... and 1815, as Fidelio. And that isn’t all. Fidelio must be the only opera whose composer wrote no fewer than four overtures for it (three to Leonore and one to Fidelio, composed for the 1814 version): these works are still played in the concert hall, although, of the four, only the overture to Fidelio makes ...”

“... invitation arrived to a meal to celebrate the winter solstice. Only six people would be there, and no electric light. That afternoon – it was a Saturday – we took the children to the pantomime. This year it was The Snow Queen. She was coldly glittery, and swirled around the stage in a platinum cloak with her comic entourage of ravens and spiders. The ...”

“... Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards ...”

“... stylish dawg. I jes don’t know rightly what it was, how I could come to doin it. But I sure’n hell did it.’ He says he could kill a man sober, eyeing his boss, Pentland.‘Sadie’, as Richardson points out, has several qualities, not a few of them nicked from Faulkner, that would mark Matthiessen’s more mature fiction: a lurid and exotic setting ...”

“... of the money thing. This is only a street in the sense that it calls itself one. A street with no pavements, no one digging holes. Noting some of the booth names, and heady with competing aromas, I was kneecapped by a four-year-old on his bicycle. His bright blue helmet said: BORN TO WIN.The spectacle of a well-meaning ...”

“... a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that.Harold​ Nicolson was writing to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t ...”

“... remarking later that ‘history came to my aid.’ He tried to join the Welsh Horse Yeomanry, with no experience of horses, and then the Artists Rifles, but was deficient in chest measurement, before succeeding with the newly raised London Welsh battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a regiment in which commissions were held by Graves and Sassoon (neither of ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... so early in the morning and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ascent. As far as clothes were concerned, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this morning, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on ...”

“... shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil engineer, built sewers, I think.– Which is a very Scottish thing to be doing.Building ...”