Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and icon… - Bill Bryson

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.