“... 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 ...”

“... on seeing a production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse at the National Theatre. The actor playing Lord Foppington, the madly vain ‘man of fashion’, was highly talented; but he (or perhaps more likely the director) had decided to make Foppington to some degree a ‘queen’, and the result was that, brilliant though the performance was in many ways, it ...”

“... opportunity, scornfully dismissing his maternal grandmother as ‘the Empress of Hindustan’. At home he supported the anti-semitic movement of the Court preacher Adolf Stoecker and became the stalking horse of right-wing schemers such as Count Alfred von Waldersee, who as early as 1884 talked about skipping a generation in the succession when Wilhelm I ...”

“... The Dupins lived in a splendid mansion near the Palais Royal in Paris, and – for a second home –bought the Château de Chenonceau, the former residence of the courtier Diane de Poitiers. Louise Dupin’s salon was one of the centres of the French Enlightenment, and her husband wrote a treatise, Oeconomiques (1745), that anticipated the calls of ...”

“... listens to guns and bombs, that the Easter Rising and the War of Independence achieved what the Home Rulers at Westminster could not, that IRA guns and Semtex would force the Brits out – have generally held sway over those who argued that violence only polarised the situation and delayed British withdrawal. John Major and Patrick Mayhew have not grasped ...”

“... against racial discrimination. It said that Dr King had been arrested seven times and his home bombed, that black students in Montgomery, Alabama had been expelled after singing ‘My country, ’tis of thee’ on the steps of the State capitol. The advertisement named no names among the forces it criticised. But a commissioner of the city of ...”

“... her divorce and lost custody of her two children. In January 2008, Britney was arrested at home and placed under a 5150 hold – temporary detainment in a psychiatric hospital – after locking herself in a bathroom with her 15-month-old son at the end of a court-monitored visit. Police cars and ambulances swarmed, tailed by paparazzi hoping to capture ...”

“... the largest, to their feudal landlord. Most peasants were enserfed – that is, bound to the lord in the place where they were born – and paid taxes in kind, in the form of compulsory labour in the lord’s fields, with the family having to surrender their best beast to their ...”

“... do with Clough these difficulties are compounded by two calamitous fires. The first destroyed his home Plas Brondanw and all his records in the study/studio and attics there. The second, gutting the main hotel building at Portmeirion, destroyed an archive assembled over two years by Amabel and myself with a view to a memorial exhibition in 1981. Clough had ...”

“... story another narrative may awaken and begin to stand up. And that will be the story you take home: the unending story of the story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only stands up but takes to running: it comes after you, and even in your sleep ...”

“... how the system works. Some aspects of the streets around the Acropolis were reminiscent of home, of Hackney: our Olympic makeover. There were newly pedestrianised walkways, planted and primped, in place of the chaos of buses, honking taxis, competitive guides I remembered from holidays in the 1950s. Thickets of incontinent graffiti rivalled Hoxton and ...”

“... Judge, I saw him rove    Dispensing good. Burns is referring to Barskimming, seat of the judge Lord Glenlee, as he finally became. At different times this estate extracted the word ‘romantic’ or ‘romance’ from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate ...”

“... Accounts vary as to how he gained the nickname El Cid, from sidi, the Arabic honorific ‘my lord’. It is often traced to his conquered Muslim subjects in Valencia, who, the story goes, welcomed him. Yet at the time others too were called ‘mio Cid’, as the Arabic loan word served as a fairly common epithet for Castilian nobles. Another, now ...”

“... on Exile’: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new ...”

“... hope these purple passages don’t embarrass you.’ A couple of years later he writes: Near home I stopped and watched half a dozen Jersey cows. How lovely they are! like Siamese cats, almost: the patches of white round the eyes and the soft way the coffee-colour melts into the white underbody. They were licking each other affectionately in pairs, on ...”