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“... no doubt difficult being an official biographer, and anyone in this position is bound to remember Lord Birkenhead’s fate at the hands of Kipling’s daughter. The temptation must be to rely heavily on the subject’s papers and memoirs and avoid seeing too much of other people’s points of view. This seems to have been the case with Mr Rhodes James, who ...”

“... a large number of people, with or without the inspiration and example of Sir Oswald Mosley and Lord Rothermere, are both zealous Fascists and devout Christians.’ But in 1934 ‘the inspiration and example’ of Mosley would have been words drily to call up rot dry and wet. The caddish effrontery of Mosley’s private life (Eliot made the relevance of ...”

“... Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to ...”

“... had always assumed that this fairly bleak period in his life came to an end with his portrayal of Lord Raglan in Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade in 1967, and then his success in Forty Years On the following year. It was certainly clear from Richardson’s film that Gielgud was beginning to act in a different way. Indeed, he was hardly acting ...”

“... painting, perfuming and manicure. He soon fell out with Wilde, partly because of his distaste for Lord Alfred Douglas, and made it a condition of his work for the Yellow Book that Wilde be excluded from the list of contributors. The veto was carried over to the Savoy, first published in January 1896, and insisted on yet again when he and Symons planned a ...”

“... and to abbreviate ‘edepol’ to ‘pol’ (to which we might compare the tendency for ‘Lord have mercy’ to become the genteel ‘lawks’ in the mouths of women in 19th-century fiction). Polytheists could indeed at times swear more colourful holy oaths than monotheists, just because they could reinforce their vows by appealing to such a ...”

“... the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the ...”

“... she thought.’ The happy couple briefly encounter Gjorg at an inn, as he is on his way home from paying the blood tax. Diana and Gjorg are entranced by each other. Both spend the time remaining to them on the High Plateau hoping with increasing desperation to catch sight of each other one more time, as the days count down to the morning on which ...”

“... tribunal’, and therefore no shared understanding. In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on from generation to generation’, life in the democratic age was unmoored, indeterminate, even meaningless. Tocqueville refused to accept this anarchic new world at face value. Instead, like a ...”

“... room, smiling at her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out in feigned alarm: ‘My lord . . . what means this?’He smiled. As though she did not know! But he enjoyed the masquerade as much as she did. Of late she had perhaps been overeager, and a certain amount of resistance had always appealed to him. So she protested but her heart was not in ...”

“... a gun to my father’s head and they ripped his shirt off,’ she says. ‘He had a tattoo of our Lord on the cross. They said: “You Fenian bastard, you have an hour to get out.”’ By the time the children got home, their father had left for his mother’s house in Catholic West Belfast. Other local Catholic families ...”

“... It opens, like Buddenbrooks, on a portrait of haut bourgeois opulence: the family at home in the family town house, the family business, the second breakfasts and creamy puddings and silver plate. The plush is thick, the family ties as sturdy as the bell-pulls, the fortune as solid as the mahogany: except that fortunes and territory in Europe can ...”

“... and at least you would have had something to do; in between the waiting, and the writing letters home, there would be bursts lit by pink light. In a way, wasn’t that a better life for the body so full of strength, so capable of saving JonBenét?What is a guy for? It’s a religious question. The teacher is maybe a Buddhist now, but he grew up going to St ...”

“... piano, two Trojan horses that brought the arts into the hitherto philistine middle-class European home. Johnson’s anecdotes and even his jokes conform to journalistic propriety. They aren’t there just for colour or to display the community’s diversity, but are targeted as in a newspaper on the private lives and hidden weaknesses of public figures. He ...”

“... for the 1788 settlement, neither of which can inspire a warm glow in the modern Australian or home country breast. One is that England’s jails, then as now, were bursting at the seams with prisoners scooped up by the mindless severity of the laws protecting property. There being no provision for life imprisonment for those reprieved from the ...”