“... 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 ...”

“... Alma Mahler Werfel​ celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out ...”

“... to whom his parents surrendered Bruce’s care for the first six years of his life. ‘I was lord, king and the messiah all rolled into one,’ he writes, about being the replacement child for his morbidly depressed grandmother’s long-dead daughter, Virginia, killed at the age of five by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. He ...”

“... Asquith to Venetia, totalling nearly 300,000 words. Venetia was the youngest daughter of the 4th Lord Stanley of Alderley, who, like most of the men in Venetia’s life, had been a Liberal MP, in his case between 1880 and 1885. She was the cousin of Clementine Churchill; before Clementine married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a ...”

“... it would destroy us, George Eliot said.According to the beau, bad hearing was something the good Lord sent you as you got older to humour you.You ask someone for directions and they say, That depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot. And you just have to laugh.It is true that we’d all cracked up over ‘five wounds’.The beau recently ...”

“... powerful and respectable overseas patrons, such leaders could then develop room for manoeuvre at home, using their relative immunity from the cruder forms of suppression to make gestures of liberal defiance against Pretoria. Since their externally guaranteed immunity made them the only blacks able to make such gestures on a continuing and highly visible ...”

“... qualified to get a commission in the army. He was sent to France in November 1917 and invalided home with a shell wound in May 1918. His undergraduate career began in earnest in January 1919. During his training, Lewis had developed a close friendship with another fresh-faced future subaltern, Paddy Moore. Lewis’s relationship with Jane Moore, Paddy’s ...”

“... offering sharia-compliant retail services: current accounts, straightforward financing schemes and home-ownership plans.The term ‘Islamic finance’ wrests a lot of activities down to a catch-all definition. The same is true, in the financial universe, of the words ‘sharia’ and ‘Islam’ itself. Sharia is not a single, coherent jurisprudence for ...”

“... public house. There were two bedrooms and two downstairs rooms: in Clare’s words, his childhood home was ‘as roomy and comfortable as any of our neighbours’. There was an apple tree in the garden, which, Clare says in his autobiography, ‘stood’ his father’s ‘friend many a year in the days of adversity by producing an abundance of fruit which ...”