“... reliefs reached the Louvre, they caused an international sensation. The British diplomat Austen Henry Layard began excavations in Nimrud (the ancient capital Kalhu) in 1845 and worked there and at Nineveh until 1851, sending back to the British Museum numerous reliefs and other objects. Financed only in part by the BM, Layard repaid private investors with ...”

“... Tonight it’s memories of Mrs Thatcher and a real feast of humbug with Lords Butler, Tebbit and Bell joining in a chorus of self-serving reminiscence of their old mistress with the equally fawning commentary supplied by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of ...”

“... Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the Europeanised cultural and literary Modernists such as Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg and, to a ...”

“... have been quite so vehement in more relaxed conditions? Would he, for instance, have included Henry Green’s Party Going in his 99 if this ‘carefully wrought poem’ had been favoured by the BMC? Probably not. Thus, Kingsley Amis’s Anti-Death League more or less has to be preferred to Take a girl like you, Iris Murdoch’s The ...”

“... still presumably expected to be greeted by a peal on the abbey bells and qualified for a passing bell if things went ill.Horace Walpole said: ‘The English are like ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters.’ That was in 1790. The English were about to undergo a collective change in behaviour: the waters to which they would increasingly waddle were ...”

“... fruits, and hot pies, gingerbread and potatoes. In this respect, Scharf made pre-illustrations for Henry Mayhew’s celebrated investigations of the London street trades. No matter that Mayhew was also a pioneer sociologist: both he and Scharf were journalists at heart, men of insatiable curiosity about how people lived and worked. The big difference was that ...”

“... men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to list). Their families often stayed on, the lofty ...”

“... of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times ...”

“... what more brilliant if small-scale artists had done in this Latin inscription of 1592 on the fifth bell in the Chapel Tower of Winchester College:  CAELESTESAUDITE SONOS  MORTALESThis says: ‘Bell-notes are prayers from earth to heaven as well as blessings descending to earth from the skies.’ The finest inscriptions ...”

“... signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who ...”

“... on the staircase by the chapel watching the departure of the royal party. I sit by the statue of Henry VI (a pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King. Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here is Coutts Bank and some ...”

“... figured me to be a potential candidate for the priesthood; she got me my first gig ringing the bell on the altar at St Winnin’s, though a combination of sleepiness and professional jealousy on my part was to harm my chances of advancement in the eyes of Father McLaughlin. Mrs Wallace’s funeral was my first one, and in some senses no funeral could ever ...”

“... possibilities have become such an accepted fact – not least in the social sciences, from Daniel Bell to Fredric Jameson – that it is easy to forget what a large-scale re-engineering of human lives they have led to. Jennifer Egan, an American writer, is rare for still being able to register incredulity at the weirdness of this process. In her novel Look at ...”

“... to limit the action to Saturday, 15 February 2003, and the early hours of the following morning. Henry Perowne is a 48-year-old consultant neurosurgeon with a large house on a square near the Post Office Tower in Fitzrovia. He’s happily married to Rosalind, a newspaper lawyer. They have two children: Theo, an 18-year-old blues guitarist, who lives with ...”

“... its provenance from the Established Church to cover the governing classes in general. What Henry Fairlie did two years later in a famous article in the Spectator was to gloss the term as identifying a particular sort of informal power network, which included not only the Prime Minister, of course, but also ‘such lesser mortals as the Chairman of the ...”