“... good enough to die in’. She does this by concentrating, like Laetitia Pilkington, on Swift ‘at home’. This is Swift in his country parish, Laracor in County Meath, cutting and planting his willows: ‘cultivating half an acre of Irish bog’, he said when writing to a friend in England, but Glendinning makes it sound as though he relished his ...”

“... would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to Poplar. They piled into the nearest boozer and pitched back the doubles until they could lift a shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel haunts Kray foot-soldier Tony Lambrianou like a psychogeographical nightmare. The ...”

“... press will describe it as an impenetrable nether region of ancient hatreds; the next it will be home to swinging multi-cultural Sarajevo at the heart of Europe. In one sense, the Prime Minister is right: Kosovo is on the doorstep. Europe will never allow it in. The West’s determination to keep most of the Albanian refugees in miserable conditions in ...”

“... taking friends on cruises in the Mediterranean and along the coast of Italy, and, on the return home, to steam out to pick his party up when the White Star liner reached New York Harbor. Morgan’s character as a deal-maker is apparent in non-business as well as business transactions. Among the more amusing episodes in the biography is Strouse’s account ...”

“... final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and most lavish display of hospitality in 1575. Among ...”

“... opened fire at several buses – some full of students, one carrying football players coming home from a match. Six people were killed. By midnight, 43 more students had disappeared, or, rather, had been forcibly disappeared. That’s where the story fades to grey. The Mexican government at first claimed that the police had handed the students over to a ...”

“... spokesperson most often put up, particularly on television, is the junior minister at the Home Office, Hazel Blears. With a name that combines both blur and smear and which would have delighted Dickens the lady in question has always shown herself to be an unwavering supporter of Mr Blair, though lacking those gestures in the direction of humanity ...”

“... state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were accustomed to going home and taking up a lot of available space in the American academy, in the American media and in American politics or diplomacy. Yet for this contingent, the whole experience had become deeply and abruptly fraught. They were far from ...”

“... the occasional anguished acknowledgment in the letters. ‘You kindly say it is nice to have a 2nd home,’ Fitzgerald wrote to her daughter Maria in 1974. ‘I wonder if you feel you have a 1st one! But we love you very much and that must count for something.’ To Carduff in 1987 she remarked that ‘on the whole I think you should write biographies of those ...”

“... only gain social status by leading colonising expeditions’. The distance they could cover from home was perhaps the ‘measure of prowess’. He comes back to this when discussing the reason Greek communities began to found distant colonies and diaspora settlements in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, and again when addressing the mystery of why the ...”

“... resenting them. In these childhood writings, this tension is resolved in the figure of the Byronic lord, at once rebellious and respected, in whom it is not hard to see a dry run for Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. A kind of upper servant, at home neither in the kitchen nor in the drawing-room, the Victorian governess was a ...”

“... collapse. As a result, ‘eurodollars’, as they came to be called, circulated in search of a home. Most governments, seeing eurodollars as hot money that might flow out as quickly as it flowed in, were wary of letting their banks accept them. However, some canny minds in the City spotted an opportunity: here was a currency that could replace sterling as ...”

“... Pagden is based in Los Angeles, and the world looks slightly different from Glasgow or my recent home in Belfast, where pre-Enlightenment confessional divisions still flourish, but his general point holds good. I am reminded of a radio interview in which the ultra-conservative cleric Edward Norman, then dean of Peterhouse, tried unsuccessfully to cajole the ...”

“... England’s trust in ‘love, and their Bible, with their absolute certainty in the power of the Lord and the protection of their guns’.Act of Oblivion is more than just a page-turner, however. Harris’s retelling takes in several thorny matters, not least of which is the volatility inherent in post-conflict politics. The novel’s title refers to the Act ...”

“... was always thought to be her aim when she appeared strong. If both super-powers withdrew to their home territory, Russia would remain in Europe and the US would not. What is being sought now is not some incremental advance in arms control but nothing less than a peace settlement that will supply the framework for international relations within Europe for the ...”