“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the Stock Exchange, and was knighted in 1997 for services to health care. Martin Landau went home to Monte Carlo for a while, but returned to the British property market in the mid-Nineties with a new firm which included on its board the chairman of the Welsh Development Agency (who also lives in Monte Carlo) and a former treasurer of the Tory ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”