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“... after Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon after the Great Rebellion could there be said to be a vacancy on the imperial throne. Taylor records the occasional efforts of Indian potentates to appeal directly to the British sovereign. He mentions, for instance, the gifts sent to William IV and Queen Adelaide by the new king of Oudh in 1834. But he ...”

“... to dinner at Sandringham, where he joined the Queen Mother in a rousing chorus of ‘My old man said follow the van’. By then Coward had developed into the figure known to his staff – at his insistence – as the Master. Interviewing him for the Sunday Times in 1969, Hunter Davies wondered if he had really met Coward or just a facsimile. ‘Is there ...”

“... cut in, the dwawl part amused, part irritated. ‘You do live in a wonderful fantasy world,’ he said. For many, most of all for many in Benn’s own Party, that is seen to be the truth of it. The caricature has shifted in the past few years: he is no longer seen as mad and dangerous, just as mad. Soon, he will have to fight hard against being ...”

“... us, and Scott explains them very well indeed, makes them very moving. In fact, it could almost be said that his characters are all the more convincing because we don’t know them: a paradox that carries its own penalties and rewards.Scott was probably quite unconscious of the fact that he had developed a technique of novel-writing which could only realise ...”

“... had succeeded in making her look again at Corbyn: ‘If this is happening 500,000 times,’ she said, spreading her hands to indicate the ramifications. None of them went so far as to say that Corbyn could win the election, but they thought it possible that Labour could emerge as the largest party in Parliament, which would require the Tories to suffer a ...”

“... New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the disintegrations and realities of the 20th century. But ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ poetry refers more simply to changes in fashion, the growing up of new groups of designers and a new generation of consumers ...”

“... it with another, to the cock of his head and the play of his eyebrows and his wide mouth, which said much that he declined to put into words. But the thing I carried away at the end of two hours was the way his person, so focused and unhurried, and his style of thinking had fused over the previous thirty years. When we met I knew nothing about intelligence ...”

“... as he jumped out of a jeep at Los Alamos base camp. His friend and fellow physicist Isidor Rabi said: ‘I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car … his walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.’ His colleague Enrico Fermi ‘seemed shrunken and aged, made of old parchment’ by comparison. Yet his euphoria passed, and ...”

“... these are among the topics considered in Getting and Spending, although in justice it has to be said that its substance is primarily devoted to the aggregate growth of that expenditure and to the fascinating recent history of attempts to plan and control it. But even if we make such allowances, the book provides only superficial answers to most of the ...”

“... even went down without a degree. However, he had another side and is remembered in the fifth of Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.) Arnold exhausted the patience of tutors, lounging back and refusing to take notes. Naturally he did not take a First in Schools. How could he, cramming three years of reading into a like number of weeks? The family was ...”

“... Louvain. He disliked drinking with the college fellows, though, and was running into trouble with Edward Lee, who, despite his friendship with More, was becoming one of Erasmus’s harshest critics. In 1518 Erasmus left Louvain for Basle to see his revised New Testament through the press. Illnesses, quarrels, deaths, friendships ... life went on as ...”

“... most women of her milieu, she was taught some Chinese and Buddhist classics, and these she was said to have learned much more quickly than her brother, who was being trained for a political career. This made her father lament the fact that she was not a man. After a few years of marriage she became a widow, and then served as court lady to the Empress. Her ...”

“... had forfeited that blessing.’ This took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated ...”

“... pacifists (‘put the lot behind barbed wire’), bureaucrats, brass hats and blimps. In 1940 Edward Hulton, the proprietor of Picture Post, said that Cudlipp was an uncomfortable sort of young man to meet. He is a revolutionary. I don’t mean he is filled up with a stock of ballyhoo about Karl Marx, or that he ...”

“... rumour at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most ...”