“... mints for you! Thank you, Justice Kennedy! Now, granted, Blakey and I already were married in our home state – at least sort of. In August 2008 we managed to sneak in and tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall during the very brief legal window that opened in May that year (after the California Supreme Court ruled that the existing state ban on same-sex ...”

“... of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding over the possibility of leaving his wife for decades, and there seems no obvious reason to look beyond the letter he wrote to her a few days before he died, explaining why he had to get away and wouldn’t be coming back: Your ...”

“... man whose whole life has been spent in a bracing atmosphere of noble thought cannot feel at home in the exhausted receiver that is called “society”’? But to Newby (as to the satirical novelist) that particular receiver is pretty well inexhaustible; he shows himself excitedly à la page with the intrigues of various society women, as well as ...”

“... her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La Précose’ already had an eye on her future. If she returned home she would soon be back in the corps: she was the wrong shape and size for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St Petersburg. Offered eight months’ work in America and a fee of £13,000 a month, she broke with the Mariinsky ...”

“... answer may prove the seminal feature of his book. He finds it in the north Oxfordshire home of Lord Falkland during the 1630s, where there met, as Aubrey said, ‘all the excellent of that peacable time’. The Great Tew circle can be studied from more than one angle. It can be seen as a literary group, a ...”

“... it – a faded provincial distance – is therefore relevant. But this is a story of ‘coming home’ in a more inward sense. In the course of the book the all-male and all-female drinking-bouts that pass for ‘social life’ evolve to something closer to simple human loving-kindness, where human beings actually talk to each other. The relationship of ...”

“... York producer sends me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a ...”

“... is the expectation – widespread in the late 19th century as well as in the trenches and on the Home Front – that the dead would regularly appear among the living. ‘Traditionally’, the dead were meant to remain dead. Ghosts appeared occasionally, but usually uninvited and unwelcomed. Their purpose in returning was generally to complain, to warn, to ...”

“... from the Palestinian Mandate, thereby greatly diminishing the area of ‘the Jewish National Home’; many Arabs in Palestine crowded into the Jewish settled areas, and therefore when they left they were not genuine refugees; the Jews did not displace the Arabs, it was the other way round; anyway, the Palestinian refugees were not driven out in ...”

“... of battle’; soldiers’ deathbed letters from the front must have shaped mourning back home. Having a model of a ‘good death’ may well have made it possible for some soldiers to die more at peace than might otherwise have been the case. It is also possible that years of carnage might have weakened the power of faith to soften the terror of ...”

“... adult, in middle life crippled and often in pain). Johnson tells how, all his life, not only at home but in the houses of his increasingly grand friends, Pope would call for the day-long and even night-long ministrations of coffee-bringers and other helps, the more willing for being charmingly thanked and very well paid. In other portraits, Pope chose ...”

“... Germans, and did not want them to control the Persian supply. In 1914, Churchill, who was First Lord, persuaded the Commons – alluding to ‘monopolies’, ‘trusts’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘cosmopolitans’– that the British Government should take a 51 per cent interest in the company. The Bill received its assent on 10 August. The still small ...”

“... all. The confessions were backed by the most overwhelming scientific evidence. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, had found traces of nitroglycerine on the young woman’s hands as soon as she’d been arrested. He’d also found nitroglycerine, he said, on her duffle bag, which had been rescued from one of the freight wagons she’d lived ...”

“... what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of faction within his party while opportunistically waiting for the ...”