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“... of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the City of London, and who could steer a man towards a governorship of a province worth as much as many a bishopric. Lyall’s clients seem not to have entered holy orders from any overwhelming desire to save ...”

“... When Bishop Berkeley wrote his philosophical treatise linking tar-water, that sovereign cure-all, with the sublimest mysteries of the Christian religion, a lay critic said it reminded him of the man who began by talking about Alexander’s battles and ended up by describing an Armenian wheelbarrow. That is how it was in the bar parlour of Wodehouse’s Angler’s Rest: ‘In our little circle I have known an argument on the Final Destination of the Soul to change inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving bacon fat ...”

“... an abiding mystery. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says, bluntly, ‘Lear, a homosexual ...’ (why else, after all, would an Englishman live abroad?). Susan Chitty’s biography, That Singular Person Called Lear (1988), was presented as a study of ‘the complicated and fascinating psychology of the Victorian homosexual’, though its author concedes: ‘It ...”

“... In the sixth year of Queen Victoria’s reign two well-bred brothers-in-law faced each other with pistols in the fields of Camden Town and one shot the other dead. The survivor, who had issued the challenge, was sure that his Merciful and All-Seeing Maker would hold him guiltless, for he had been grievously wronged: in the course of a business dispute he had been ordered out of the other man’s house in front of a servant ...”

“... of American Marines stacked like cordwood in Korea, awaiting shipment home. Heren, born in the East End of London, was taken on as a messenger boy in Printing House Square when Geoffrey Dawson was at the helm. If, fifty years on, he had succeeded to the editorship, he would have known better than to cast himself as an unofficial member of the ...”

“... swollen to the size of a melon, ‘which he did his best to ignore’, as one hopes everyone else did. Gout, the ancient podagra, has been called a disease of civilisation. According to this book a disorder traditionally linked with the cities of the West is now spreading in the more developed parts of the Third World. Yet gout seems never to be ...”

“... What can Anne Edwards tell us about this business? Unfortunately she knows no more than anybody else and can only ask a string of questions. Eddy, first-born of Edward and Alexandra, the ‘dawdly’ flaccid prince with the long simian arms and the prominent collar and cuffs, armed with the potentially damning knowledge of how to disembowel deer, must be ...”

“... fell on Chiswick. It was ‘the weapon you never saw coming’, but in fact some observers on the East coast occasionally saw the vapour trails of V-2s rising from the launching sites in Holland (an experience akin to that of hearing the Ypres guns in the earlier war). Those Londoners who endured the rockets well remember how the impact preceded the sound of ...”

“... the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ‘Beachcomber’. Enough of that; the game is too easy to play. The entries are skilfully ‘potted’, judicious in the DNB manner, but the more one browses the more it is apparent that a double standard is operating. In one class, that of the learned editors, the physicists and the cataract surgeons, the ...”

“... the basic graces and affectations, but his own manners were as much in need of refining as anyone else’s. Yet this was the man who, as master of ceremonies, took it on himself to ban the wearing of swords at social functions, to discipline titled ladies on the dance floor, and to shout at booted squires: ‘Did you bring your horse as well?’ The story of ...”

“... in which Chunee had been kept. Were the quarters of the Tower elephants any better? If nothing else, Chunee’s fate is a tale of hideous incompetence. How, the reader may wonder, did Hannibal dispose of unwanted elephants? How did cavemen ever contrive to dispatch a mammoth? Under a former trainer of Chunee, Alfred Cops (who once had a nasty encounter ...”

“... minister. In France the authorities tightened up such rules as existed after that mishap, but else-where aviators were allowed extraordinary liberties, as they still are. A future Wohl volume will perhaps tell how, for hundreds of thousands on the Concorde descent path, the pilot is seen not as the embodiment of godhood but as the boor who charges into ...”

“... Dr Johnson in his Dictionary defined ‘network’ as ‘anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections’. How, then, would he have defined ‘zip-fastener’? Since a certain testiness was apt to impair his objectivity, he might have settled for something like: ‘a hateful device in which collinear interdigitation usurps the function of buttons ...”

“... Three writers on the strength is a potential embarrassment for any fighting unit. In the Great War the Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers could muster Robert Graves (Good-bye to All That), Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer) and Frank Richards (not, as some have supposed, the creator of Billy Bunter but the author of Old soldiers never die, an excellent view of the war by a Regular in the ranks ...”

“... These courteous gentlemen, sometimes playwrights themselves, had his measure, but they gave him an easy rein, resignedly accepting ‘a characteristic immoral twist’ and admitting that they were not arbiters of taste, while drawing the line at indecency. With The Vortex the problem was not so much a son accusing his mother of unchastity – ‘revolting in ...”