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“... to become known as the ‘Conservative century’? This is the claim which Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball advance in the wide-ranging and thought-provoking volume which they have edited. ‘Either standing alone or as the most powerful element in a coalition,’ they write, ‘the party will have held power for seventy of the hundred years since ...”

“... compared the gravity of this situation to that of the Great War, and its consequence was, in Stuart Ball’s words, ‘a reshaping of the party system, and a new basis in the pattern of issues, which was to hold sway for the following fifty years’. The difficulties of 1929 to 1931 were of three kinds – imperial, economic and ...”

“... Ontology resembles an old-fashioned game of Solitaire, in which you eliminate one glass ball after another by a regular procedure of reduction, hoping to be left at the end with just one ball at the centre of the board. In the development of ontology, the hope is that the one ...”

“... rubber bands around the wrists of my gardening gloves, and shimmied up the tree on which the rugby-ball-size blob of twenty thousand or so bees had settled, with a queen in their midst. The rest flowed as if a re-enactment of a swarm-catching miracle I’d witnessed as a mesmerised six-year-old. Badger Kirby (so named for the streak of white in his hair) came ...”

“... command of the main road heading west from London. To puritan polemicists, it was also tainted by Stuart moral corruption, a ‘limb of Babylon’ dripping with effeminate decadence and idolatrous popery.A preliminary sally in July 1643, when the Parliamentarian commander Colonel Richard Norton had expected ‘much spoil and little opposition’, had ended in ...”

“... The second is by an admirer of Richardson’s novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady Douglas as she became, has been redeemed from the archives of the Border nobility, with the blessing of a former prime minister, Lord Home. The memoir appears to have been written at some point in the 1820s, and is ...”

“... standing by her man in much the same way as Mrs Sheridan. But even the historically fragrant Mary Stuart, with her talent for poetry – ‘I am but a body whose heart’s torn away’ – would have struggled to compete with Mrs Sheridan’s estimation of her husband’s hirsuteness. ‘He looks like a gorilla,’ she said. ‘He’s covered in hair frae ...”

“... the convicts out of sight. For last year’s Bicentenary, replica convict ducks, with imitation ball and chain and spray-on sweat, were sold. So the revelation of a convict ancestor in the Pilger family has none of the iconoclastic impact he expects. The radical edge to writing on convicts has long since been blunted by those historians whom Robert ...”

“... Index than ‘Dickens: novelist’. A gem is Jane’s account to her cousin, Helen, of the great ball they went to at Bath House in July 1850, at the height of the London season. ‘Mr C.,’ Jane reports, ‘was “quite determined for once in his life to see an aristocratic ball”.’ Seeing was one thing, being seen ...”

“... rubbage’: 236 families lost their homes there. The church survived, minus its spire; a cannon ball is embedded in the masonry. Even places that didn’t see any bloodshed suffered: husbands were absent fighting, disease spread, there was swingeing taxation and slumps in trade. In Battle-Scarred, a collection of essays that examine the physical and mental ...”

“... of another correspondence such as she had had in the past with other men of letters – with Hugh Stuart Boyd on prosody, with Richard Hengist Horne on contemporary literature, with Benjamin Robert Haydon on the artist’s vocation. Browning in this first letter told her that he loved her poetry with its ‘fresh strange music, the affluent language, the ...”

“... birth, Princess Margaret was often to be described, in the years ahead, as being typically ‘Stuart’, in contrast to what was regarded, in the same journalistic shorthand, as Princess Elizabeth’s stolid, more ‘Hanoverian’ appearance. And indeed, for a while, the younger princess’s looks did seem to reflect something of the elegance and romance ...”

“... right turned 41, Europe had been locked in intractable ideological bloodshed. The allegory for the Stuart monarch was upside down: it was Sedition who was pushing down Minerva, the goddess of state wisdom, with no bottom to the abyss in sight. The canvas, you might argue, was equally upside down. While Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre, his ...”

“... by Day 6 the full weight of exhaustion – had the new blood run out? – hit me like a wrecking ball and I spent that weekend asleep for ten and more hours of daytime after eight or nine hours at night. Days, by the way, are my new way of telling time. They are the units of chemo, Day 1 to Day 21, after which it all starts again at Day 1. Day 6 or 7 is the ...”

“... Lord Kilmarnock used their last moments together to dismiss the idea that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, their ‘bonnie prince’, could have signed such an order. They both ‘vehemently denied’ it before they walked to the scaffold. Whether Cumberland himself was aware of the forgery, or even arranged it, is not known.The duke was disconcertingly young ...”