“... 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 ...”

“... been an important centre of diffusion for enlightened ideas, was plunged into revolt, as was the home of Rousseau’s ‘helvetic muse’, Geneva. Finally the world, essentially aristocratic and monarchical, which the men and women of the Enlightenment had struggled to improve collapsed in a revolution whose aim was to transform, not reform, society. It ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1967 I joined the Literature panel, from which, however, I resigned after a few months because Lord Goodman, who was then chairman of the Arts Council, did not convince me, as he did the rest of the panel, that the Council should withhold subsidy from a magazine that held a competition for poems written under the influence of drugs. I kept thinking of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the historian for the showier trappings of the historical novelist. In his capacity as Lord Thomas of the Centre for Policy Studies, he has indeed made public his desire for a new, self-confident mode of national historiography, and the question arises inevitably: is this an earnest of his intentions? The first chapter, entitled ‘The City of ...”

“... came in handy, you might say, in lordly imputations of sexual inadequacy, as when Fielding called Lord Hervey Lord Didapper. The Earl was giving Dryden the ‘scribbling author’ the sort of lofty treatment which commoners like Dryden himself, as well as Swift and Pope after him, liked to hand down to still lower ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as a young American student, George Ticknor, was to note on meeting him in 1815. ‘I have seen Lord Byron,’ Lady Blessington recorded in her diary on 1 April 1823, ‘and am disappointed.’ It is hardly surprising that people should have confused the poet with his heroes. After the success of the first two cantos of the Pilgrimage, he churned out the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to have lost money on the venture – and he shipped out in 1847 on the same boat that delivered Lord Dalhousie, the new governor-general of India. For three years, Hooker travelled through India, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan by foot, pony and elephant; climbed mountains up to a height of almost 20,000 feet (at which elevation he confessed he was a ‘gone ...”