“... 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 ...”

“... Thomas fitzThomas, at St Paul’s in 1265: ‘As long as you wish to be a good king and lord to us, we will be faithful and devoted to you.’After this unpromising start – a civil war in which the barons only narrowly opted in the end for the child Henry rather than Louis – the reign of Henry III was to be the longest of any English king before ...”

“... and diminished by it? One answer might be to move far away while constantly reminding those back home of your existence, your ambitions, your still being one of them. How might you do that? Perhaps you could write about the place critically, portraying it as a zone of suffocating limitation, spiritual death even, somewhere any sensitive intellectual would ...”

“... can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one ...”

“... time we quit while the going’s good.’ The doctor and nurse were blank. When we got home the Poet said he supposed they didn’t watch much US TV drama. It was only later that I thought that maybe, ever since Breaking Bad’s first broadcast, oncologists and their nurses all over the Western world have been subjected to the meth-cooking joke ...”

“... feminism’ has given women the idea that it is ‘socially affirming’ to ‘work outside the home’, and that schools in Massachusetts have banned children’s books featuring heterosexual parents. His wife home-schools their seven children, and he believes that education is the responsibility of parents, not ...”

“... for the last hymn, Hail Queen of Heaven, part of the gradual curves of her calves. He reminds Our Lord present on the altar that he has never tried to see beneath her skirt and asks Him to protect her always from boys or men who may want to do impure things to her. In answer to his prayer he is allowed to see how the man who goes ...”

“... great private houses of the aristocracy were increasingly hemmed in by shops, inns and theatres. Lord Cavendish, irritated by passers-by throwing oyster shells and other rubbish over his garden wall at Burlington House, blocked it off on the west side by building the Burlington Arcade – then, as now, the longest arcade in Britain. Despite all the ...”

“... submitted a memo in which he set out at some length the dreadful scandal of the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast. Wallace had submitted his first report on Kincora more than two years before and had even put out a press statement in early 1973 which stated that William McGrath, head of the sinister Orange private army, TARA, was using ‘a non-existent ...”