“... 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 ...”

“... owned on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, or jotted down later from memory, when he returned home to his wife and family or to his desk at the bank that employed him. Whitman very seldom acknowledges that his conversations are being recorded. But he makes it clear that as a form of biography he prefers this method to anything more studied, more given to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... driving force of her narrative. In her long list of star-spangled acknowledgments (Prince Philip, Lord Carrington ...) she apologises to du Maurier’s children for exposing ‘events in their mother’s life which were unknown to them and which have proved painful for them to discover’. The apology is seemly, but she must have had qualms when explaining ...”

“... Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters it. Completed in 1937, it also has something of the bullying pomposity characteristic of official buildings erected ...”

“... for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a 19th-century source informs us, her husband ‘wished to know whether he would ...”

“... sister is a heartless Goneril. An emotional entanglement leaves her ‘exactly in the condition of Lord Hardy and Lady Charlotte in The Funeral’ (by Steele). Her rift with the theatre manager Fleetwood is glossed over with a quote from Peachum. Even in moments of trauma, her sense of theatre is uppermost. Returning ...”

“... at which grace, delivered by the senior man present, sometimes lasts a long, long time: ‘O Lord, we want to thank you for this wonderful weather we’ve been having ... temperature up in the nineties and looks like staying that way ... for the good cooking of Shirleen here and Mary Belle ... for bringing into our lives our guest this day, John Rayburn ...”

“... was standing in the cathedral: ‘on the very spot where rather more than five years subsequently Lord Nelson was buried – a spot from which we saw, pompously floating to and fro in the upper spaces of the great aisle running westward from ourselves, many flags captured from France, Spain and Holland ... these solemn trophies of chance and change amongst ...”