“... walking tour, leaving his clothes on the banks of the Danube to suggest that he’d drowned. (Lord Cockburn, a family friend, feared the influence of Young Werther and ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’.) He reappeared in Edinburgh two years later, still not cured despite the excruciating interventions of a Hungarian surgeon; eventually a French ...”

“... Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy used BBC classical records from a Shaftesbury Avenue shop. They circulated among themselves copies of the New ...”

“... palatinates, territories to which the king’s writ did not run. Instead, Castor explains, the lord of such a region ‘had the right to exercise judicial authority within its borders in the king’s name and on his behalf’. Richard was earl of Chester, and when he was at odds with Parliament he could more easily recruit men and resources from the ...”

“... ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the expeditions more than made up for it. Bennet Burleigh, their doyen, had a ...”

“... talk constructively to the United Nations or to Alfonsin. What is peculiar about the decline at home is not that it happened at all, or even that it happened for the reasons it did, but that everyone was so transfixed by it. Hence the delay, and then on the left me farce, on the right the force, of the eventual reaction. The story is indeed awful, but ...”

“... this is that Gascoigne did not produce the blinding line or the sumptuous phrase for T.S. Eliot to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He certainly ...”

“... Here and there McWilliam does catch a glimpse of the Claimant as a more timeless figure: a modern lord of misrule, the ultimate inappropriate person. His childlike greed, his knee-jerk lusts, his refusal to be cast down, make him irresistible in a ghastly sort of way, and it is hard not to sympathise with him through all the ordeals he brought on himself. The ...”

“... of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ever commanded popular assent. When Erasmus called him ‘a man for all ...”

“... to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee and joins what is baggily known as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his ...”

“... was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought up and has his constituency in Smith’s home town of Kirkcaldy, but it was also a product of his distaste at the reductive reading of Smith by those on the right, and his need to find historical inspiration for a non-conservative, communitarian engagement with the inevitabilities of global ...”

“... a college freshman), but in the 1950s, famous after the publication of the technically masterful Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he started to feel stultified by the modernism of his heroes: ‘I began to have a certain disrespect for the tight forms,’ he said in a 1961 interview. Poetry had ‘become a craft, purely a craft, and there must be some ...”

“... period of arduous military training; eventually he was sent to France as a signaller. His letters home convey military life experienced by ear – he heard the departure of a battalion to the Front as the end of the development section in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. A later posting had a ‘Scarlatti, early Mozartish’ atmosphere. He ...”

“... is a man of some culture – he reads Dante and Shakespeare, thinks of Odysseus as he travels home – but the lineaments of his experiences may be typical of those ‘BOR’s’ who served in the colonies during the war. And his lack of liberal sympathy may have one merit: for it is perhaps a further refinement and extension of Imperialism to seek, in ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and tolerably easy of ...”

“... of the Southern Review: ‘PLEASE ADVISE BY WESTERN UNION IF MRS LOWELL KNOWS SHORTHAND.’ At home, she had to retype his poems every time he changed a word. During the war he was in prison for several months for his own bizarre form of conscientious objection, and he possibly broke her nose at least one more time in a fight. Their last summer ...”