“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is this more fundamental charge of duplicity that Cook feels demands closer investigation. Perhaps Lord Butler may yet resolve such issues, but the signs are hardly promising. No doubt most people will read Point of Departure to learn about the run up to war, but it is the sorry tale of Cook’s ministerial frustrations as leader of the House, particularly ...”