“... or matter-of-factness into their ceremonies. The invitation to the recent memorial service of Lord McAlpine included the brisk line, ‘We have taken a large church’ – meaning St Paul’s. On the other hand, the real aristocracy very often still have the worst of it, as the late Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, wrote in her wonderfully candid ...”

“... the fact that the rest of them are canards did not prevent them from growing into chickens coming home to roost or even, in one or two cases, fully-fledged albatrosses. If Churchill was the victim of the first – a composite lie assiduously put about by the Labour Party – he was the perpetrator of the second. Numbers 3 and 4 originated in a mixture of ...”

“... sense, but the response to a crisis which is either close to death or mimics it. Death itself, Lord Yama, repeatedly fails to keep dates, even when Jasmine has arranged her wedding to him, in the form of sati. Jasmine’s several incarnations are more than a device. They exemplify the main power a passive character has: to become someone other and stop the ...”

“... refused to help a politically incorrect body. The corpse started a long and halting journey back home, got stuck at endless African airports, began to decompose. Eventually, Barnum got it disguised as a Taiwanese spare part, smuggled it across the Zimbabwe border and the great Soweto funeral show could go ahead at last. Various factions disagreed over which ...”

“... the Master that blindness barred him from most sports, the question was determinedly pressed home: ‘What games do you play? Cricket, Rugby, Tennis?’ Such tenacity, such singlemindedness. And it was much the same with other dons he met. A philosophy tutor gave him the titles of five hefty-sounding volumes and told him to read them by the following ...”

“... the times of Francis I and through the château and the brothel before it was transferred to the home. Yet the author has surprisingly little to say about spas or eaux minérales. He is informative, however, on washbasins, fountains and washhouses. On the first, he reminds us that the French word for washbasin, lavabo, is borrowed from the language of ...”

“... her mother, but not until well into adult life. I feel that with R.B. Haldane, the philosophical Lord Haldane of Cloan, as brother-in-law I, too, would have swung to Conservatism. There was too much philosophy, too much ethical responsibility, too much intellect about. Does Benton realise the vast certainties of the Haldane stance? Naomi jumped into marriage ...”

“... language has its way with him. A lot turns on how he reacts to this condition, once it is brought home to him. Graham’s attitude is light years away from those who, having discovered duplicities in language, are determined to root them out; or those others who, having discovered the duplicitousness, delightedly aggravate it. The better alternative, Graham ...”

“... yet had capital to spare to lend to foreign governments, build railroads and other public works at home and abroad, and lastly, and very reluctantly, supply long-term finance to British manufacturing industry. On this last point, Kynaston shows much better and more concisely than all the vast ‘decline of Britain’ literature why the City and the men from ...”

“... original if somewhat amateurish begetter of methodical inquiry into the membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons ...”

“... Her imagination seems to have been inflamed by chatting with Jane Cumming, and with a maid at home, who proclaimed that one of the teachers must surely be a man, and that both should ‘be burned’. After this conversation, Miss Munro, who was a little deaf, took to lying with her bad ear on the pillow. None of the pupils’ testimony was ...”

“... popular press – to change the metaphor – a very different animal from what it was in, say, Lord Beaverbrook’s time, and Mr Foot was a great friend and employee of Beaverbrook’s. His complaints against the ‘personal venom and malice’ of ‘Mrs Thatcher’s beknighted friends in the press’ – he retains something of a soft spot for Mrs ...”

“... herself seems often to speak on behalf of some public body. And sure enough she speaks up for Lord Robbins and her other colleagues, for the most part robustly impenitent though prepared to concede ‘a disturbing development, which we did not anticipate when we reported in 1963’ – that is to say, ‘a marked swing against science in the schools and a ...”

“... from his Cambridge friend, Matthews, in which tidbits of information about the homosexual scene at home are given to Byron, and arch requests are made for news in return about the traveller’s successes among the youths of Greece, Turkey and Albania. For the rest, Crompton relies on previously published biographies (those by Leslie Marchand and Doris Langley ...”

“... still more or less current: ‘what time do you have?’ Proust, though surely more of a stay-at-home than Zola, concurred with him about ‘those marvellous places, railway stations’: indeed, the title of his masterpiece echoes the most evocative phrase in any language for a booking-hall, la salle des pas perdus. Often enough, the vicissitudes of railway ...”