“... family lived in Budapest and summered on the family estates in the southern Carpathians – which Patrick Leigh Fermor has called ‘the most resented frontier in Europe’. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the onset of political and racial turmoil, the Goldfinger family moved to Vienna. In 1920, Ernö went to Paris, by then as a Polish ...”

“... a post which brought more prestige than income. Like Tennyson’s despondent father, or the fiery Patrick Brontë, Gabriele Rossetti was a displaced figure. His thwarted ambitions shadowed and deepened the lives of his children. All four took it for granted that they would not be ordinary. It was the children’s responsibility to justify their father’s ...”

“... to build walls to protect themselves from the people in the countryside. And when a new kind of wall, the border which created Northern Ireland as a separate entity, was constructed, it ensured that there would be a permanent, large minority of disaffected Catholics in the region, almost as though Ulster needed a substantial ‘enemy within’ in order to ...”

“... In my own family, 1944 wasn’t remembered for D-Day but as ‘the summer we went along the Roman Wall on the tandem’. When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as ...”

“... of Lords was dismantled and recast in the 1870s. The story of how that happened is well told in Patrick Polden’s section on the law courts. Although it was the supreme appellate forum in civil matters (there was no real criminal appeal system), the House of Lords had a chaotic procedure in which the quorum of three could be made up of any peers, legally ...”

“... privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had been Dean since 1714. A tablet of black marble was to be fixed to the wall ‘with the following Inscription in large Letters, deeply cut, and strongly gilded’: HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS ...”

“... imaginable. One prisoner was subjected to forced ‘rectal feeding’. Another was chained to a wall for 17 days. A third, subjected to sensory and sleep deprivation and chained to a concrete floor, died of hypothermia. The secret programme was placed under the guidance of two former instructors in resistance to torture, James E. Mitchell and Bruce ...”

“... of a sliced head of red cabbage and here evocative of churning surf. This stone is identified by Patrick Rogers in his guide to the cathedral’s stones as ‘Fantastico Viola’, a recent trade name for a variety of richly veined marble from the quarries of Carrara and Seravezza.It may be that when marbles were thought to be liquid in origin – when ‘few ...”

“... for the bar-mitzvah of Joshua, their eldest son, to be held not in a synagogue but at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but he was quite strict about what women mustn’t do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords with the Egyptian Government of Sadat. Shepherd was one of those alarmed by ...”

“... interior life for his character: it’s a problem he tries to side-step by giving his character, Patrick Bateman, a 27-year-old Wall Street super-yuppie who goes around gruesomely murdering people in his spare time, no internal life at all. Bateman’s head is entirely filled with things like this: Price seems nervous and ...”

“... on US tutelage like the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. On 31 January he told the Wall Street Journal that ‘Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.’ Assad and his allies in the ...”

“... Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a comic book of the filmscript of Syberberg’s Hitler, or a bag of (used) truncheons for sale. Once ensconced in the plane, a smiling hostess hands one a copy of Esquire for April ...”

“... likes photography, but not fashion photography.’ Robin Muir, the curator, and the set designer, Patrick Kinmonth, have no doubt done their best but the Portrait Gallery is an awkward space. From the main corridor and the rooms that usually host the modern part of the NPG’s collection, they’ve created 15 chamberlets, sprouting from two ...”

“... surrounded in Derry, as the Protestants still are, by fierce native Irish, they reckoned a stout wall would be a good investment. The walls of Derry still stand, still belong to the Hon. Society – which remains discreetly in business in the City of London – and figured prominently in the events of Bloody Sunday, as the Inquiry has been hearing.A ...”

“... with Robert Armstrong in late December 1980 in his studio in Gorey, Co. Wexford, rests against the wall of the room where I work. We are uneasy with each other now. The talk turns to Christmas and he mentions the sadness of Gorey and that extraordinary space he made behind his father’s shop, which I think is part of the shop now, or is a store, and the ...”