That the Beatles had not yet found out remained a hallucination with Brian, despite grins exchanged behind his back, and despite John Lennon's occasional brutal puncturings of the masquerade.

British soldiers in Egypt used to have jerrymander fights, pitting one against another.

In many ways it is easier to penetrate the English elite if one hails from rural Wyoming than from cockney Cheapside. Many of the most Brideshead characters I met in Cambridge, for example, actually came from abroad. There was the German lawyer in my course who wore a different-colored paisley ascot every day of the week.

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.