“... at the time and he didn’t gain admission to the Club for a decade. After that, he was often back home in Auchinleck or working (more or less) in Edinburgh, while Johnson’s Turk’s Head appearances decreased as the Club expanded and became, he complained, ‘a mere miscellaneous collection of conspicuous men, without any determinate character’. Johnson ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... chooses some telling anecdotes. At Cambridge, for example, Byron was evidently eager to play the lord and wore magnificent robes; but he subsequently reproached himself for spoiling his appearance in hall by ‘diffidence’. The episode gives a good clue to what is going on in his most exuberantly ‘Byronic’ poems, which, at their most ...”

“... inequality and social stratification. The market economy, it could be said, renders the citizen lord of the marketplace in his role as consumer, but its browbeaten serf in his role as worker. And since these different roles can hardly be kept in quarantine from one another, the scope even for lordship of the marketplace will shrink: an individual will be ...”

“... house, Homewood, on the Knebworth estate.) From the start, Emily was an outsider in her own home; when she was Lutyens’s fiancée, she began to sew their entwined initials on the bed linen, but it was Gertrude Jekyll, known as Aunt Bumps, Ned’s brilliant patron and collaborator, who chose the colour of the thread. Lutyens immediately lighted on his ...”

“... is rather different, primarily because far more has always been known about it: its status as the home of a high culture is better documented archaeologically and (ever since Champollion) in literary terms, and it has the most ancient recorded pedigree of any Mediterranean country. There is much less to add or correct. But one area remains in which Egypt too ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interests him are itineraries and concatenations. His chapter headings say it all: Brahms Leaves Home; Berlioz and Spohr in London; Brahms and Liszt in Weimar; Wagner and Liszt in Zurich; and so on to the end of the year, with Brahms, Berlioz and Liszt in Leipzig and the Schumanns in Holland and Hanover. I imagine him poring over train timetables, hotel ...”

“... literature, girls, swearing, having it in for people and doing impressions of what Bradford calls Lord David Cecil’s ‘upper-middle-class drawl’. By the standards of the time their jokes had a punk rock aspect – Amis wrote fondly years later of the days when saying ‘fuck’ counted as ‘the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger’ – and many of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Benson, the future archbishop of Canterbury, another married the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh. Eleanor’s brother was the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Sidgwick knew a great deal about the inner workings of English politics as the various Irish and imperial crises unfolded throughout the last third of the 19th century; the unease ...”

“... he was everyone’s pal. After he’d gone to his happy hunting ground, the people of his home-town, Dampier, clubbed together to raise a statue to his memory. He now has two memorials. The episodes strung together here are the kind that circulate by word of mouth in isolated communities. One well-meaning sheila (‘woman’) attempts to burn some ...”