“... as fantastic and artificial in its way as Ranelagh. ‘Certain gardens,’ Ian Hamilton Finlay has said, ‘are described as retreats when they are really attacks,’ and Miss Jekyll’s were attacks on the old Morrisian demons of ugliness and standardisation, but also on a world where country estates were getting smaller. Her integration of the garden with ...”

“... of ministers and officials alike that they should be accountable, in public, for what they have said and done. This malaise is not, of course, unique to our own time. It derives some of its potency from more long-term, in some cases enduring, problems. One is the growth of diplomacy within international organisations, much of it concerned with economic and ...”

“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”

“... lives and defined personalities in his. At the very outset he demonstrates this skill. There is Edward Parry, son of a cultivated and fashionable doctor in Bath – well-educated, intelligent, pious – a team-player very quick to use his charm and his connections to his own advantage, but also courageous and steadfast. There is John Ross, Parry’s ...”

“... despair, and die!’ The ghosts are those of the people we know as the Duke of Clarence, Prince Edward, Queen Anne and others. The movie is Richard III, although the man in the novel doesn’t know this, since he has caught only part of the film on television, and the time is the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The toy planes and the movie run through ...”

“... humble birth, could have such courtesy. Grosseteste acknowledged that his parents were humble, but said that he had lived his life among really great men – the men in the Bible. Both parties sound a bit rude, but perhaps in both cases unintentionally, Richard merely having the usual manners of the English aristocracy and Grosseteste believing that the ...”

“... anything to do with the Nazis was as damaging to the nation’s soul as anything alleged against Edward VIII. Wodehouse had been an emblem of Britishness for the smug, Daily Telegraph elements in the United Kingdom: his work was ‘the sort of thing foreigners don’t understand’ – like cricket, Gilbert and Sullivan. Malcolm Muggeridge has told an ...”

“... barbed wire they are what the world was like Before the War. We take the cards and steam off any Edward VII or George V stamps to use as (pretty mediocre) swaps. Among the picture postcards are photographs on stiffer card: Grandma on outings with the ladies’ bowling club, striding along some promenade in a long, laughing line, big ladies in cloche hats and ...”

“... This reflects their own pleasure in the chase: in exploring, for example, the tower raised by Edward Bull (who later built Borley rectory) – ‘the most frightening building we have ever been half-way up’ – or in penetrating the dank underground works at Witley Park, which culminate in a small underwater ballroom with a glazed dome – a people tank ...”

“... can turn out much like another’s. At least Polanski (as transcribed, if that is the word, by Edward Behr) is witty enough to make several of his own productions memorable. At first, he provoked disaster: while still at Lodz, he enlivened his own apprentice film of the end-of-session school dance by inviting a gang of tearaways to smash the occasion ...”

“... by the triumphant Times. Campbell came down uncompromisingly for free trade. The Regulations, they said, were indefensible, and contrary to the freedom which ought to prevail in commercial transactions. Although the seller of a property may put what price he pleases upon it when selling it, the condition that the purchaser, after the property has been ...”

“... a cobbler who was converted after hearing Whitefield and became one of John Wesley’s preachers; Edward Caswall (‘Bethlehem of noblest cities’, ‘See, amid the winter’s snow’), the Tractarian clergyman who followed Newman to Rome; and How, the Bishop of Wake-field (‘It is a thing most wonderful’, ‘For all the saints who from their labours ...”

“... will not go away,’ Samantha Power, his protégée and Barack Obama’s human rights tsar, said a year after Holbrooke’s death. And indeed he hasn’t. In the wake of Donald Trump’s ascendancy, praise of Holbrooke reached fever pitch among members of the ‘resistance’. Yet this desperation to keep his reputation warm may indicate the American ...”

“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... in her hand, big blue eyes and big shiny diamond all sparkling for the camera. The text underneath said: ‘You can’t look at Jane and tell me she’s not worth two months’ salary. I mean just look at her.’ The two months rule is often described as a myth, or sometimes even as a lie, as if the answer to the question of how many days’ pay a ring should ...”