“... had], and I just want to inform you that we’re going to burn down your office, burn down your home. You and your family are going to burn, you bastard.” ’ Later, outside the TUC Conference at Blackpool, being, as was his wont, jeered at by hard men wearing SOGAT badges, ‘I felt a chill go down my spine as I thought – I recognise that ...”

“... mood of unease, especially among the Tory backbenches and in the House of Lords. The formidable Lord Northcliffe, once he recognised the great lead which the Wright brothers had achieved, ordered the big guns of his Daily Mail to be turned against Whitehall’s apparent inactivity. The great ‘naval scare’ of 1908/09, when the nation’s alarm at the ...”

“... the patient intelligence that compensates for growing old. As Hercule Poirot had waxed moustaches, Lord Peter Wimsey collected first editions and Nero Wolfe wore yellow pyjamas, so Wexford is the sort of man who is always badly dressed and is never certain of having a clean handkerchief. Like Appleby, he has a tendency to quote from literature, but the ...”

“... of her Naval nephew during the Falklands War. Nor did my first Parliamentary Question to the Home Office in November, before the inquest on Miss Murrell, elicit anything more than a routine reply. I therefore had quietly to go to ‘friends’ to make inquiries. In such situations I choose friends on the basis of their likely position to know, of their ...”

“... spirited exchange of stones with a madman. In these high places were evocative place-names: Swat, home of the mysterious Akond invoked in Lear’s poem; Malakand, where Churchill was a war correspondent; the pass where Alexander the Great met the naked Gymnosophists. The other journeys took in Kashmir, Srinagar, the ...”

“... it treason to ‘publish and pronounce, by express writing or words, that the King our sovereign lord should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the Crown’; but the indictment on which More was tried did not charge him with accusing Henry of heresy or schism, for he had been careful to keep his counsel about this. It charged him with ...”

“... here is Mr Wellbeloved the unlovable superintendent of the Twilight close municipal old people’s home (the pun in the name could be Mr Wellbeloved’s doing). At other moments, the books take wing towards Dickensian grotes-querie. In Hopjoy was here, a barber, poised over his customer with the scissors, offers a further tonsorial service:   ‘The ...”

“... of being Foreign Secretary. On leaving the offices of the Evening Standard, where he had found a home, he recorded that he felt that it was ‘very soiling to live among people so extremely empirical, quotidian, shallow and mean’. How different was Mosley, by whom Harold ‘was fascinated, almost to a masochistic degree’. The association with the New ...”

“... letters some glimmers of his old genius for descriptive prose, a genius liberally represented in Lord Clark’s Ruskin Today, first published in 1964, which Penguin has restored to print. Generally, however, the famous lapidary style of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice doesn’t often appear in Ruskin’s side of the correspondence. The Carlyle of ...”

“... penal laws, who created our modern budgetary system. Above all, it was Peel who, in the words of Lord Blake, created a ‘libertarian fiscal policy which would in the end bring increased affluence to every class in society and thus relax the tensions which in the hungry 1830s and 40s threatened revolution in Britain’. Disraeli was the dreamer and the ...”

“... published years later), detailing her illness, treatment and recovery. She was operated on at home without anaesthetic, apparently fully conscious through most of the procedures. It was not, she wrote, until she was on the makeshift operating-table and heard the surgeon ask, ‘Who will hold the breast for me?’, then glimpsed him make practice strokes ...”

“... Wilkes was as conservative as any of his compatriots. His well-publicised arguments with John Home Tooke and others inflicted terrible damage on metropolitan Radicalism. As Thomas ably demonstrates, this was less a matter of principle than personality. Tooke believed that funds collected for the work of the Bill of Rights Society were being diverted to ...”

“... the preface to The Region of the Summer Stars, is based on ‘the expectation of the return of Our Lord by means of the Grail and of the establishment of the kingdom of Logres’ – though Vale Royal is not a work of Christian mysticism, and Christian symbols are only one element in its helical structure. Dun’s expectation is that the arrangement of words ...”

“... and he had withdrawn temporarily to England. In March 1587 a recently appointed privy councillor, Lord Buckhurst, had been sent to the Netherlands to find out what Leicester had been up to; he wrote several reports home which were unfavourable to Leicester, and came back at the end of June. The dates of his trip fit nicely ...”

“... analysis had failed to do in the 1960s and 1970s. Not being a great one for crowds, I stayed at home with the TV on, just watching and wondering at the events of that week, which really were strange on a scale beyond anything I’d encountered. Some months later, I saw a documentary made on the day of the funeral, in which a bag lady was asked for her ...”