“... 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 ...”

“... described by Malcolm Muggeridge and Evelyn Waugh (‘Smell like fox’). He died in his Sussex home in 1953. Belloc was sometimes taxed with being the author of W.N. Ewer’s much anthologised squib: ‘How odd/Of God/To choose/The Jews.’ As a young man he had maintained Dreyfus guilty against all the evidence to the contrary. Was he an anti-semite? In ...”

“... were conducting what is now called ‘pre-emptive defence’. Almost the first question the future Lord Carver asked me when he came to visit my company was how I persuaded my riflemen that it was right for them to violate an international frontier. The ‘party line’, which came into play if we had a casualty across the border, was that we had been there ...”

“... delights of Sayes Court and the hospitality of John and Mary Evelyn. The king and Clarendon, the lord chancellor, made the journey, so did Henrietta Maria, old Constantyn Huygens from The Hague as well as Louis XIV’s expert vegetable gardener from Versailles. Pepys, often at the dockyard on business and living in Greenwich during the plague, dropped in ...”

“... the Children of Israel repeatedly sinned against their sponsor, Yahweh, and with each sin the Lord arranged punishment in the form of conquest by the strangers on the Israelites’ borders. Geopolitics will not do for Yahweh’s People: only their own solecisms can account for loss of territory or sovereignty. Once you have a god on your side, nothing can ...”

“... an entry in the index, where there is no entry either for Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), Constantinople (home of what was probably the largest Jewish community in Europe in the 18th century), Amsterdam or Salonika (one of only a handful of cities at the start of the 20th century that had an absolute Jewish majority). As a result, many issues of importance even to ...”

“... awareness that distinguished him from most of his civilian counterparts. He used his Letters to Lord Hawkesbury (1801) to lambast the terms of the Treaty of Amiens, and to warn of French ambitions in Egypt and the Mediterranean. These letters are normally described – as in this edition – as driven by political conservatism, yet in terms of strategic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them from one far-flung posting to the next. Sometimes parents sought to leave their children at home while they travelled abroad. Joseph Galloway was reluctant to drag his daughter across the Atlantic with him. ‘It was at first my resolution to leave her. It was also her inclination to stay. But with whom could I leave her?’ he wondered. Patriot ...”

“... and one of Jeeves (‘London’s Finest Dry Cleaners’), but in 1501 this was Wynkyn de Worde’s home and printing house: he rented a former inn for £3 6s 8d a year from a priory in Buckinghamshire. De Worde would have looked out at the cistern house of the Fleet River; on a weekday morning now, the glass and chrome of Shoe Lane is full of suited ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the seed pouch continues to grow. Then we scratch the seedcase with a ghoza’ – a small home-made trowel with a serrated edge of six teeth. From the wounds a sticky white milk emerges. ‘You scrape the poppy in the morning and then collect the sap in the evening, when it is more sticky and brown. A little from each flower and then you have a ball ...”

“... language (‘Well, just look at Davey Witt. Davey refused to sleep in a room alone now. Lord only knew what those poor boys had been through, so far away from Baltimore.’) She leaves the language transparent so that through it we can see with the same eyes as her protagonists. This is the reunion of Michael with his mother after he’s been ...”

“... 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 ...”