“... as a result of the commitment of commercial banks to countries which could not repay. He quotes Lord Lever, who recently told a large lunch of international bankers in London that he had ‘never been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the ...”

“... who was the Deputy-Prime Minister of the Kirghizi Republic. After we had discussed her goats at home, the excellence of her walnuts, and the fact that her district grew the most tasty apricots in the world, she came to the point. Fourteen times, she told me, her fellow tribespeople on the other side of the Afghan border had asked for military help to ...”

“... inspecting her: ‘Your sweat, your wrinkle cream – quite useful, Eh?’ To make her feel at home, the goddess addresses her as Elly. The vulgar touch is applied not only to mortals but also to Homer’s beautiful but terrifying goddesses. When Aphrodite rescues Paris she comes ‘waltzing up to it, in oyster silk,/Running her tongue around her ...”

“... the refugees (bearing in mind that Dayton does not specify the right of Croatian Serbs to return home)? The Dayton Agreement is probably the only way out of the current mess. But the very novelty of this peace deal means Europe must remain extremely cautious about the possibility of it succeeding. How did our continent allow itself to sink into such a mire ...”

“... orphan, adopted by his rakish uncle Edward, also a guard at the Glace. They live together in the Lord Nelson Hotel, and get on well enough, despite differences of disposition. Edward likes to womanise, gamble and drink whisky; DeFoe is introverted, shy and given to ironing at times of emotional tension. His troubled love affair with Imogen Linny, a caretaker ...”

“... life than we were; but it would be useful to look – as Bridge does not – at some of the parts Lord Nolan’s reforms have not reached. Some minor scams which escaped Nolan, such as the merchandising of MPs’ addresses (for a sizable fee MPs gave as their home address the office of a lobbying organisation, to which ...”

“... From 1963, when the Engineering Building was completed, every alert architect or student, from home or abroad, took the train or headed up Ernest Marples’s empty new M1 to see what had happened in Leicester. Following the, by then, well-worn pilgrimage route in the early 1970s, I can remember the electrifying effect of the building, even on the dingiest ...”

“... together. Winston’s wife Clementine was a very good player, too – when she could get away from home for long enough to show it. She met Lindemann in mixed doubles at Eaton Hall in the summer of 1921, and rather took to him. At the same time, the duke came to suspect that Lindemann and Churchill would get on well together, had them both to dinner, and was ...”

“... for Ireland, the country of his grandparents. Ireland, he felt, could injureEngland less with [Home Rule] than she does without it … She seems to me an example of a country more emancipated from every bond, not only of despotism but of ordinary law, than any so-called civilised country was before – a country revelling in odious forms of ...”

“... to say camp’. Pevsner agreed: ‘very pretty’. It was the work of Paul Paget and John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already ...”

“... but not personally an arch-enemy of Elizabeth.) Kelley was also receiving regular letters from Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief adviser, begging him to return home ‘to honour Her Majesty … with the fruits of such great knowledge as God hath given him’. Or if he could not personally return, perhaps he might send ...”

“... strike that note too: ‘It is astonishing how much material there is around here,’ he reported home to a colleague from Ireland. ‘Some of it is hard to pry up, but generally if people are reluctant to tell a biographer they have confided something or other to their friends, who have less compunction.’ Ellmann was an honourable man and this slightly ...”

“... by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel. Of the seven children of David and Sydney, Lord and Lady Redesdale, six were girls; the Mitford industry revolves, lighthouse-like, between them. Nancy, the novelist, wit and Bright Young Thing, comes to prominence whenever her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of ...”

“... positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride to literary notoriety on Emily’s white ...”

“... in the world since then and is now an outpost of Birmingham University, but in its heyday it was home to a writer with some claims to be the most widely read, in English and in translation, across the world. Visitors already knew so much because Marie Corelli not only boasted the longest entry in Who’s Who, but had enjoyed commercial success and ...”