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“... joins the celebrations of harmony at the back of a polished Mercedes and at the bar of the luxury Lord Charles Hotel. The papers dwell in infinite detail on the refined menu, not failing to notice the visitors’ preference for the carvery. How much it costs the taxpayer to accommodate the ‘poor ANC’ in style provides another headline. In the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Irish Protestants in 1642, and almost £150 in relief after the massacre in Piedmont. Nearer home, £95 was collected in a single week in 1640 for victims of fire and plague in Yeovil and Taunton. Week by week they relieved their own poor, and devised ways of helping the afflicted. Contemporaries did not doubt, nor does Professor Underdown, that the spur ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than Walpole’s time. No doubt there were always enterprising families who made model theatres at home, but as a commercial product they first appeared in 1811, after which they rapidly acquired a standard form.The theatre itself, like its full-size equivalent, had proscenium doors and galleries. The base was wood, the interior paper, and it came with scenery ...”