“... public order over much of what had been the Frankish Empire. The consequence was that the bond of lord and man was almost all that was left by way of social cement. The predatory appetites that this form of society had always generated sought wider outlets as they were increasingly canalised at home, with the difference ...”

“... the American edition of Gerzina’s book). Neither writer refers to Gory, the black manservant of Lord Monboddo, whom Johnson and Boswell encountered on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local ...”

“... was built. As is clear from the tortuous story of how he financed and completed his film of Lord of the Flies, he is not immune to the bruising pleasures of making do in a commercial world (‘This was not an ideal technique,’ he says of the cut and paste editing, ‘but it was the only technique open to us’). And while his whole directorial career ...”

“... opportunity, scornfully dismissing his maternal grandmother as ‘the Empress of Hindustan’. At home he supported the anti-semitic movement of the Court preacher Adolf Stoecker and became the stalking horse of right-wing schemers such as Count Alfred von Waldersee, who as early as 1884 talked about skipping a generation in the succession when Wilhelm I ...”

“... of the 1760s had a field-day with a heroic John Wilkes (‘Wilkes and Liberty’) and with Lord Bute as Public Enemy Number One (no fewer than four hundred anti-Bute satires appeared, mainly sporting a jackboot and a petticoat inscribed ‘no petticoat government’, in reference to Bute’s alleged liaison with the King’s mother). The American ...”

“... life or in the heroes of his novels. Powell perceived, for instance, that Waugh was perfectly at home in his father’s house, that the pair were for the most part on affectionate terms and understood each other very well. Equally normal were Waugh’s social ambitions and responses, which again, in a stylised sense, were not unlike those of a minor ...”

“... remark about the IRA bombers, and for his invitation to Sinn Fein to visit County Hall, if the Home Secretary had not changed the focus of the uproar by ‘excluding’ the two Sinn Fein MPs from the British mainland. He declared that Labour would stay in office and simply refuse to raise transport fares after the law lords’ judgment, and was saved from ...”

“... There is a certain pattern in this, for Henson père had quarrelled with his father and left his home on the Somerset-Devon border in his teens and worked his way up to some prosperity in business. That Henson fils was uneasy with his father, reacted against him and later began to adopt some of the old man’s prejudices is evident as the story of his life ...”

“... it should be urged that there are many black legends about Churchill, put about originally by Lord Haw-Haw and his friends during the war. One of the few certainties we still cling to is that the Nazis were defeated: but you never know, and in this context Gilbert’s defensiveness is comprehensible. In any case, it is important to stand back from the ...”

“... to win an election its appeal must be much wider than that. The Party must win support from ‘the home owner as well as the homeless’, he said in a major speech in 1983, ‘the stable family as well as the single parent, the confidently employed as well as the unemployed, the majority as well as the minorities’. But it is all, surely, in vain. A Labour ...”

“... Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters it. Completed in 1937, it also has something of the bullying pomposity characteristic of official buildings erected ...”

“... trustworthy). Throughout all this, he drilled out several million words of highclass copy for his lord and master, Hearst. ‘I never bite the hand that feeds me’ was Runyon’s motto as a journalist, and over the years he made sure that he never had reason to fall out with Hearst, even during the proprietor’s pro-Nazi phase. By the end of the ...”

“... for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a 19th-century source informs us, her husband ‘wished to know whether he would ...”

“... a kindly aunt, Hannah Lumb, who was willing to give her small niece a comfortable and dependable home in the Knutsford that Gaskell later remembered so sympathetically in Cranford. Despite her absent mother, Elizabeth was lucky. What emerges most clearly from Chapple’s work is a sense of the independence and vitality that characterised the prosperous ...”

“... free of all that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say that this was ground that the Lord still held. What he looked out upon was the sign of a broken covenant. The place was forsaken and his own.In his introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and ...”