“... of the German declaration of war on Russia, ‘he found the PM and ladies playing bridge – and Lord Crewe said it was like playing on top of a coffin. They waited till they had finished – about an hour.’ The same code applied on the Tory side. When some MPs went to haul Bonar Law back to London from a Thameside weekend party in order to denounce the ...”

“... in the index. The assassination of Aldo Moro is referred to five times; the assassinations of Lord Moyne and of Count Bernadotte are not mentioned at all. The root cause of Arab violence is thus suppressed, and we are then given to understand Arab violence has no cause at all. It is mere violence for its own sake. At the time, as Mr Townshend says, the ...”

“... her chosen male mentors, Higginson most prominent among them; her late, happy romance with Judge Lord; Austin’s prolonged adultery with Mabel Loomis Todd, the young wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor; and the unexpected discovery after the poet’s death of nearly 1800 short poems. The stories of heartbreak and mental breakdown that colour so ...”

“... virtue and learning. Everybody’s advocate and a model judge, he is a splendid public servant, at home and abroad. Colet used to call him England’s only genius. As clever as he is good, More is a living refutation of the belief that true Christians are to be found only in monasteries. Erasmus’s More, pictured as dragged to Henry’s court and moving ...”

“... lovers hope. Currently Walker’s Crisps are running a TV advert in which Gary Lineker, returning home from Japan, sits on a park bench beside a little boy and then, saying ‘No more Mr Nice Guy,’ steals the child’s crisps. If Walker’s were smart they would make a sequel in which Lineker, making off with the bag of crisps, is stopped in his tracks by ...”

“... the housing crisis in the Highlands and the unwillingness of any government to tackle second-home ownership; the characterisation of the region as a place of picturesque wildness, a holiday destination, which implicitly classes infrastructure as an anomaly; and the continuing waste and environmental damage from field sports (inhibited woodland ...”

“... me free …” that sort of thing. But where was God now, with Heaven full of astronauts and the Lord overthrown?’ It’s a question that many have grappled with, including Joni Mitchell, lightly paraphrased here. The lines are from ‘The Same Situation’ on her 1974 album Court and Spark: Still I sent up my prayer Wondering where it had to go With ...”

“... a small rundown house in Shoreham. The cottage feeling certainly was primitive: he called his new home ‘Rat Abbey’. Palmer’s rural retreat was companionable. His father sold up, followed his son to Shoreham and settled in a spacious house, which was just as well since Rat Abbey could not accommodate many guests and Palmer had numerous visitors. He was ...”

“... detachment of a scholar of great brilliance. He has the sensibilities of someone deeply at home in the strange times he chronicles. He knew most of the protagonists of this book: his is a small country where murderers and victims lived side by side. His father was a senior official in post-1956 Hungary; as a boy he holidayed with the executioners of ...”

“... children of the 1860s. Jim liked to tell the story of the silver paper knife his father brought home on one occasion with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and how his blushing mother had called her ‘“a shameless hussy” and hid the knife under a clock’. Like stories about covering up piano legs, it was Ede’s generation’s way of laughing ...”

“... in the mid-1930s – his own late forties. Not much wildlife about and we were thinking of heading home when a plump cock pheasant whirred across the ride looking for a spot to roost. I raised the gun, but while I was still fumbling with the safety catch an elderly figure leaped out with startling agility from a bend in the avenue. He wore a battered felt hat ...”

“... to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to ...”

“... To Sotheby’s where I’m reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen’s Private Secretary. Talking of A Question of Attribution, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether he knew that the ...”

“... been wounded on active service and who had two sons serving in France (and five other children at home). She owed the landlord less than a pound. The factor was prevented from entering her house by a crowd including the local ILP councillor, John Wheatley (one of the ILP MPs elected in 1922, and responsible in 1924 for the Housing Act, which enabled central ...”

“... by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now ...”