“... 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 ...”

“... Martial offence. He was 22 years old, and it has been five years since he has seen Christmas at home … Thinks Nazism would never work in this country, because people prize their individual liberty too highly, whereas they don’t in Germany. He seemed quite intelligent. Now, there’s a job I’d really like to have – re-educating German prisoners of ...”

“... win a Westminster seat at the next election, lies nicely along the axis of his commute between his home in South London and his office at the European Parliament in Brussels. If Kent, cartographically speaking, is England’s right foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe, pointing east into the sea towards Belgium. It hasn’t been an actual island since the ...”

“... clown in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), but the much more complicated character who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the ...”

“... have been known to question the wonders of the BBC Golden Age, noting that, despite Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, a lot of the Wednesday Plays and Plays for Today won tiny audiences then and would look embarrassingly crude today. Those who believe that all drama aspires to the condition of the single play should note that, by the early 1980s, the ...”

“... not even noticed and quick as a fish he had darted away leaving Geoffrey to eat alone and return home disconsolate, where Clive duly came by to give an account of his afternoon. True, Clive was not choosy or how else would he have got into bed with Geoffrey himself, episodes so decorous that for Clive they can scarcely have registered as sex at all, though ...”

“... when, in the middle of life’s path, the poet loses his way is not unrelated to his loss of his home, of Florence. So hell presents itself first and foremost as a place of exile. To an extraordinary degree death is annulled, in the sense that the dead are to be considered dead only insofar as they are not among the living. Otherwise, however awful their ...”

“... legs’ are ‘pied with water-drops’ from ‘waste-ground’ to ‘the carpets of my home’. Pieings and peeings, spatterings and messings acquire a weird power. In ‘The Secretary’, the speaker, ‘Pantless, under a slim formal skirt’, tells how ‘beard-rash twinkles on my thighs’ and watches a man’s teeth, their defiled whiteness ...”

“... literate people would have had only a general idea that the Odyssey was about a magical journey home and that the Iliad was about war. The few who actually read Homer at this time tended to read Latin translations, such as those by Eobanus Hessus and Lorenzo Valla. These translations made Homer look familiar. They often quoted or adapted lines from Virgil ...”

“... the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know Casement’s handwriting. Collins did. He said it was his. The diary was in two parts – bound volumes – repeating ad nauseam details of sex perversion – of the personal appearance and beauty of native boys ...”

“... eventually led to Swinton’s proposal coming to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Which is how, in January 1915, the future tank became a naval project. Swinton did not learn of this development until late in May, but Churchill had made considerable progress in the meantime. A new Landships Committee was to be chaired by ...”