“... 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 ...”

“... following ocean paths otherwise traced only by the wind. He was so persuasive that when I got home from the party I ordered a compass for my own bike. With it, I imagined, I too would become an urban navigator, unbound by convention or app. Instead, I got lost. Repeatedly and hopelessly lost. My compass directed me into cul-de-sacs and down dead ends; it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There needs to be recognition that many people have dual allegiances – a fact which comes home to some only with the advent of civil war. A Scot has an allegiance to Scotland and to Britain, an early 19th-century Virginian to his State as well as to the United States. Without its being a full national allegiance, many Jews have a consciousness of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and discouraging group animosity would ‘probably break or weaken the bands of society at home, and close the busiest scenes of national occupations and virtues’. At one level, Ferguson was the Iron John of the Enlightenment. Warning against the complacent assumption that civility was to be found only in the epicene refinement of salon culture, he ...”

“... 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 ...”