“... of violence, hypocrisy and will by which slave-driving settlers such as W.C. Wentworth, ‘the lord of the lash and triangle’, Benjamin ‘Flogger’ Boyd and John MacArthur – all of whom we meet with in the narrative – came to control the land, ‘filling it with blood and the suppuration of needless misery’. What keeps this spirit ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you conform. In such an environment gossip is an instrument with real teeth: your job and your home may depend upon it. Is gossip still a killer in the Western world? Liberalism has gone to a lot of trouble to draw its teeth, and to make sure that whatever you do you won’t have to suffer for it physically at society’s hands. In her novel The Groves of ...”

“... was still terra incognita, as far as Europeans were concerned. A vast expanse of territory, home to a variety of indigenous peoples only some of whom were in direct contact with white traders, figured on European maps as a blank, sprinkled sparsely with names added as much in hope as in knowledge. This cartographical ignorance and its implications for ...”

“... the Black Hole as ‘an exemplification of Mohamedan insolence, intolerance and cruelty’. Lord Curzon, viceroy of India between 1899 and 1905, took ‘a special interest in memorialising the Black Hole’. He commissioned a new monument, purporting to represent the exact dimensions of the room, to be placed in a prominent location in Calcutta, next to ...”

“... solidest and best?’ he asked. ‘I have no use for days or weeks of genius, or an extraordinary Lord God.’ Offered the chance to travel abroad by a Berlin newspaper, he countered: ‘Do trees travel?’ Surveying the people around him, he concluded, tolerantly: ‘God is the opposite of Rodin.’ This preference for the small, the servile, the overlooked ...”

“... with a fortune derived from the railroads and land development; her mother, Sybil, was daughter of Lord Desart, an Irish peer. Socially speaking, Iris could expect to be regarded as ‘somebody’ and when it became time for her to ‘come out’, she had to do it in three separate countries (Italy, England and the US). Her parents had met when, as a very ...”

“... doubtless for more sinning, but seeing the remarkable change wrought in her by God had adopted the Lord himself. And life was good. They lived, I had to concede, in what seemed very like paradise: Silvie, her husband, their four children, their blind dog, on their beautiful deer farm, with intensely green rolling hills on which deer grazed next to a swathe of ...”

“... a large tepee as a place to sleep. I liked the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist. However, everything at Summerhill – where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws – is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for the summer of 1993 I ...”