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“... in Bucharest made famous by Olivia Manning (he even said ‘What ho!’ three times in Reggie Turner’s ineffable Shakespeare production). Detaching himself to Egypt, he joined the Army and was commissioned on the General List. So began an often convivial wartime career as liaison officer with the Poles, with whom he served in North Africa and Iraq and ...”

“... Who prizes objectivity? Not Piers Brendon, who has had enough of long ‘photographic’ biographies and is all for ‘the irradiation of an epoch by means of sharp biographical vignettes’ in the Lytton Strachey tradition. ‘The camera’s lens reflects verisimilitude,’ he writes, ‘whereas the prism of the artist’s imagination refracts truth ...”

“... produce a warm glow in the hearts of ordinary folk everywhere’. If Henry Root has done nothing else, he has exposed the mealy-mouthed subservience to which a regard for public relations has reduced so many in authority. What has become of the dignity of office, never mind the insolence of office? Why do public figures take outrageous insults lying ...”

“... children for adults, but child readers, both boys and girls, took over and the author had to go easy with butts like the Society of Ancient Souls and the Society for the Encouragement of Higher Thought (the Twenties spawned endless cults, from Couéism to Eurhythmics). Some truly excruciating literary poseurs arrive to stay in William’s village, among ...”

“... If the Knight of Glin, the MacKinnon of MacKinnon and the McGillicuddy of the Reeks did not exist, there might be less need of books of etiquette. These veterans of Debrett’s Correct Form (where they rubbed shoulders with Midshipman the Duke of Loamshire, a difficult guest to place at table, especially with admirals present) are back trailing their dignities in Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners ...”

“... The last Dakota to fly supplies into Berlin in 1949, at the end of the Soviet road-and-rail blockade of that city, was inscribed with one of those apt Biblical references which the Services (usually the Royal Navy) seem able to conjure up at will: Psalm 21, verse 11. The verse reads: ‘For they intended evil against thee; they imagined a mischievous device, which they are not able to perform ...”

“... In a storeroom at Sussex University lie the records of Mass-Observation, an organisation of anonymous people-watchers which in its heyday ran into much criticism. Some of its supporters made large claims for its methods and findings; respectable journals hailed a new form of social research, while others jeered; Evelyn Waugh complained of ‘pseudoscientific showmanship ...”

“... on their regular business? Why not send up the equivalent of thousand-bomber raids from the East Anglian bases on this heroic mission alone? Sleep on ...”

“... A multi-volume Anthology of Huntingdonshire Cabmen (‘sure to be the standard work on the subject’) was a running gag in J.B. Morton’s ‘Beachcomber’ column in the Daily Express. Compare and contrast, as the examiners used to say, with the anthology of Wednesfield trapmakers which occupies more than a hundred pages (with 70 more pages of non-Wednesfield trapmakers) in this extraordinary compendium, or ‘mine of information’, disarmingly entitled Rural Reflections ...”

“... William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, was born ‘in a somewhat furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris. The party included the Duke’s mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and his four young children, two of them by Lady Elizabeth, whose company Georgiana ‘for reasons best known to herself ...”

“... generation Margaret FitzHerbert says that their inheritance from the Empire-builders was ‘an ease around the world, and an infinite self-confidence. Following their knightly imaginations, wandering across the face of the earth, they had no axe to grind. Theirs was, briefly, an age of chivalry, soon to be laid at rest in the trenches ...’ We are talking ...”

“... young ensign? He was the third son of William Aitchison, who had an estate at Musselburgh, East Lothian. Only with reluctance did he agree to enter the Army and allow his father to purchase an ensign’s commission in the Third Regiment of Guards, later the Scots Guards. At 19, he served in the siege of Copenhagen and two years later sailed with his ...”

“... for it needs winnowing of a great deal of chaff (quite apart from contemporary drivel). Who else, for instance, would bother to quote this pensée on the subject of the Sabbath: ‘Why is Sunday such an empty day, anywhere, city or country?’ It is by Katherine Butler Hathaway, one of 40 entries from her Journal and Letters of the Little ...”

“... escapes from the garden in the past, is not very nice. Who wants to eat fat hen when spinach is easy to buy?’ Not for her the Emerson definition of a weed: ‘a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered’. This dismissive attitude will not worry Rosamond Richardson, whose Hedgerow Cookery carries on the tradition of books with titles like How to ...”

“... chief scapegoat by Cecil Woodham-Smith, in The Great Hunger. He is a dominating figure – it is easy to see why Trollope cast him as Sir Gregory Hardlines in The Three Clerks – and one is grateful whenever the course of the book’s meanderings gives another excuse to appraise his career. Perhaps it is time he had a biography to himself. It was his ...”