“... pages! It is certainly a ‘sad, sour sober beverage’. (There is so much in these pages that Lord Byron said first, and better, and with merciful brevity, and without the advantages of sociological research.) The men are always off on a fishing trip, the women always masturbating in the bathroom. When he comes ...”

“... and his lifestyle were probably very like those of a British official in India. His resemblance to Lord Reading is stressed; Reading, though expressing respect for the natives, kept them in their place and had Gandhi convicted on a charge of sedition. Reading may not have needed a knowledge of Indian languages, but it may be thought that Pilate had some ...”

“... for some of the early paintings is only two feet or so – which reminds you that Delft was the home of Carel Fabritius, who painted a strangely distorted view of the city that seems to have been part of a perspective peep-show, and of Samuel van Hoogstraten, whose perspective box is a peep-show in its own right. It can still be peered into at the National ...”

“... not inconsiderable, but it is academic and journalistic, not archival or written by participants. Lord Russell (I say this without certainty) might have offered an updated characterisation of his party as it developed in the Ashdown era, as seen by an insider who is also a leading historian. Sadly, he does nothing of the kind. He turns instead, as is natural ...”

“... technicality and it was rumoured that young Curzon had been in the picture, the boy’s father, Lord Scarsdale, continued – as did many parents of lesser eminence – to hold O.B. in the highest regard. George himself, on leaving Eton for Balliol, wrote O.B. a long and admirable letter expressing his sense of ‘how good and great an influence’ O.B. had ...”

“... Albanians: Hoxha’s tyranny endures to this day. It may occur to the reader, as it occurred to Lord Selborne (the last head of SOE), that SOE agents, especially those equipped with W/T sets, were admirably placed to establish a post-war intelligence network, as the Russians were doing. We do not know what Churchill would have made of this proposal; Attlee ...”

“... and feet beating against the floor.’ Nevertheless, the bringing of these sounds into every home in a way that suggests that MPs are unwilling to listen to the other side, and can do nothing better than to exchange jibes at a time of economic distress, has not enhanced the prestige of politics. There had always seemed, to foreign observers of our ...”

“... Manifesto promised that Britain would be planned ‘from the ground up’. Herbert Morrison, the Lord High Planner-in-Chief, talked of planning as a distinctly British contribution to civilisation. But a cloud of semantic confusion has concealed the fact that there never was a plan. There were controls inherited from the war years and committees for ...”

“... to a remote and moribund feudalism from which George Washington delivered the land of the free and home of the brave once and for all. It is not equality of opportunity which is the issue here. ‘Self-help’ as preached by Samuel Smiles was, after all, a catchword of Victorian England, and ‘the constitution under which we have the good fortune to ...”

“... he didn’t find it hard to carry out something like this. He told me that he had two children at home but that he got used to this work, which he seemed to do with the utmost satisfaction.’ It is almost as if these workmanlike murderers had been asked, as Englishmen were during the war, to ‘Dig for victory’: here was a necessary task, perhaps not an ...”

“... These boys were not, as at Shrewsbury and Bradfield, the sons of mere Northern manufacturers or Home Counties bourgeoisie. Their fathers were dukes, earls and viscounts who were not at all opposed to corporal punishment but who expected a modicum of consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay ...”

“... vulnerability of the kind of flawed hero whose archetype is the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. (‘Oh Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived ... I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me ... But if I say “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and ...”

“... sooner arrived than it had come under the control and guidance of a new set of tribal chiefs, with Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but ...”

“... trod on toes, and made no secret of one or two ignoble yearnings. ‘An ancient name, a stately home and a couple of thousand acres’ would, we understand, have had a calming influence on Evelyn. So, too, with the son. Auberon believes, or so he says, that one of his father’s great missions in life was to ‘make jokes, to turn the world upside down and ...”

“... You are Margaret Oliphant Vous êtes Margaret Oliphant Sie sind Margaret Oliphant I love my home, its lares et penates Of broken shoe buckles, balls of green wool, Needles, its improvisatory architecture Feeding my work with interruptions, turns Snatched, forty-winked; stashed seed pearls in a dish Radiate homely, incarnational light Sometimes the green ...”