“... 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 ...”

“... the girl’s hunger for warm affection is too intense for those social virtues: too much to make a home out of that cold, brittle, colourless, elegant, hollow house, shuttered and muffled against the noises of London, wherein Anna’s ‘cut-glass’ lamp drops its complex shadow on the white stone floor, where the hearth of Thomas’s study is warmed by the ...”

“... was a poet, playwright, pianist, composer and actress, and these activities took her away from home for long and irregular periods of time. When she rematerialised, we had long goodnights during which, as she sang to me, I undid her hair so that it fell over her shoulders. She used to parade naked in front of me, and would tell me (for instance) of the ...”

“... royal rights that had lapsed, relied on monasteries to house old servants who needed a retirement home, and took a far more active part than their predecessors in choosing new abbots. Yet all this was paired with Henry VII’s truly exceptional plans for a permanent memorial for himself: a thanksgiving for having become the least likely king of England since ...”

“... was that you had to deal with foreigners. Abroad was scarcely less of a problem for them than for Lord Redesdale, immortalised by his Mitford daughters and famous for saying that ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’ The bloodiness of Abroad was something that Stalin and his cohort knew by repute rather than direct experience. Stalin ...”

“... fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and 16 furze bushes’. A century later the design for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of ...”

“... of judgments based on appearance. Commentators are quick to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of Tony Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and ...”

“... second significant event was the debate over ‘Rothschild’ – that is, the report in 1971 by Lord Rothschild, head of the government ‘Think Tank’, on the organisation and management of government R & D. His crude demand that research results should be supplied, on ‘contract’, for the ‘customers’ that were buying them, was a direct challenge ...”