“... soup … A knife hangs over the rice ladle.’ The masses say: ‘The communal canteen is a dining hall (a place for getting food), a tribunal (a place where kitchen staff beat and scold people) and a bordello (where team leaders and managers hire the prettiest girls as kitchen staff and mess around with them).’ What he doesn’t mention, surely because it ...”

“... one imagines an English country house should be, a hotchpotch of different periods: medieval hall, 18th-century courtyards, Gothic front, solid green walls of yew and parterres of box. We film in a gallery adjoining the drawing room, part of the private wing, with photographs of Lord D. at Cambridge, in India as a young man and ADC to Wavell and now ...”

“... Picture and the Men – An Historical Study (1900), which remains an indispensable resource.Henry James was among the many who followed these developments with interest. He had long been an admirer of Holbein’s portraits. Reviewing an exhibition of John Singleton Copley’s portraits in the Nation in 1875, he had noted that Copley was ‘by no means a ...”

“... Cabinet? Sometime in the spring of 1967, I trudged along to a protest meeting at Oxford Town Hall. The line-up was of the sort summarised by the phrase ‘stage army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... Later, she was a tireless secretary for the Association for the Education of Women. Somerville Hall (Mary suggested the name) was the result. Exasperated by her opposition to women’s suffrage, Somerville came to repudiate its association with Mary Ward. Nevertheless, her work to make women’s education in Oxford happen was the first and not the least of ...”

“... the wronged maid; the spirit of an evil ancestor whose painting hangs in a gloomy panelled hall; the friend or relative who is dying far away. Dickens was discussing tales told around the fire at Christmas, but similar types appear in accounts that claim to be true. In The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead, Carl Watkins tells one of the ...”

“... and 1997; there will be few spending commitments, and he will deliver that news to a gratified hall which loves nasty medicine; he will deplore a ‘class ceiling’ that holds back talent and rewards iniquity; he will mention the climate crisis and wish he could do more; he will scatter a few surprises, probably on childcare and perhaps on education. He ...”

“... recalls: ‘A shadowy greatness gathered. She hinted at connections with the Whartons of Wharton Hall in Westmorland ... She even hinted at a Missing Will. I listened and pondered.’ Shortly before World War Two, Michael dropped the name ‘Nathan’ and adopted ‘Wharton’. His wife had borne him a son and he wanted to make a new start in life, to become ...”

“... Gus Van Sant’s new film, Milk, is thoughtful, patient, funny and touching, and both Sean Penn and James Franco should get Oscars, but it doesn’t answer the questions any biopic raises for me: what’s it for and why now? Or perhaps it does have the answers, but we have to do our own digging for them. Harvey Milk was an elected official of the city of San Francisco, said to be the first openly gay man to hold public office in the United States ...”

“... elaborate table silver for granted, undergraduates at my own college regularly drinking beer in Hall from 17th and 18th-century silver tankards. The spoons, though, I knew were in a different class and indeed they had to be deposited in the bank between visits. Bruce enjoyed food and was quite funny and snobbish about it. Dining once with him at the ...”

“... What strikes one about the garden at Lamb House, as redesigned by Henry James, is that it possesses all the ingredients of an old-English garden, yet the impression it makes is American. It seems on principle to want to do without mystery, even the mild mysteries beloved of English gardening-folk. In some indefinable way it is a public garden ...”

“... remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious ...”

“... showed around twenty NF supporters, all men, giving Nazi salutes as they went into Southall Town Hall. Southall was one of the most racially diverse areas in London: in five wards surveyed in 1976, 46 per cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in ...”

“... Each and every​ place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them ...”