“... loneliest years, a figure on the box in the evening and in the papers in the morning – a kind of home-town weather, looked up regardless of where a traveller happens to find himself. He inspired me, among other things, to try my own hand at professional basketball, though I lacked the talent to play in America. In that first aimless summer after ...”

“... flattering traits. Though he was an amusing companion, nobody ever called him a warm man. Even at home, he left himself at home; the depths only show in what he became on screen. Critics have paid their respects over the years with an admiration that has often seemed to catch the admirer by surprise: Otis Ferguson, a ...”

“... just heard a ‘very good sermon’ on the circumcision of Christ. He writes that he ‘stayed at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts’ while his wife – never named, only ever ‘my wife’ – ‘dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand’. When he goes with her to his father’s house, ‘in came Mrs ...”

“... and she turns immediately to the Bible which ‘fell open near the beginning. She read: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain.” ’ The scar on Stephen’s face (the result of a wartime wound), which becomes livid at times of stress, functions as that mark. Despite Hall’s attempts to court the sympathy of heterosexuals by writing about a textbook case of ...”

“... and the tactical strengths and weaknesses of the opposing forces. He knows well how to bring home the significance of the political resolutions that gave the war its visible turning points. Most historians of the war have been able to do reasonable justice to episodes like these, but Sumption’s narrative has other and more individual strengths. It is ...”

“... the way he earned it: Stevenson lived like a genius and he died like one, 12 thousand miles from home. Every aspect of his talent was clouded in Romantic ether – the cough, the dreams, the night-sweats – and determined by the hold of memory and the pulse of freedom in his Scottish heart. Paler than Chatterton, camper than Shelley, the only son of 17 ...”

“... between 1720 and 1725, for instance, with the Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock (1712-17), home of the goddess of bad moods and sick fancies:Here in a grotto, shelter’d close from air,And screen’d in shades from day’s detested glare,She sighs for ever on her pensive bed,Pain at her side, and Megrim at her head.The cave is just as rich in surreal ...”

“... be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed’. He himself felt ...”

“... with (Schwartz’s childhood friends called her Lady Macbeth). Harry often abandoned the family home for periods and in 1923 packed up for good, moving to Chicago. Afterwards, worried that Delmore was becoming a ‘violin’ of his mother’s ‘sick emotions’, he offered to buy his son from Rose for $75,000. (She said no.) One of the terms of their ...”

“... with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then discovered that the same now unimaginable fiscal laxity that allowed me to claim Supplementary Benefit, as it was then called, also entitled me to three years of Scottish Education Department postgraduate student ...”

“... This evening his routine had been broken. He had not taken tea with his mother. She was not home. She had gone to grieve with a friend who had just lost her husband. He had gone to the funeral yesterday but his mother would go every day for three days, then every Thursday for three Thursdays, then on the fortieth day, then on every anniversary. Although ...”

“... she told herself, and go and get your son from the lane. All the other children must have gone home by now. Go on. She got up slowly and walked out of the room closing the door carefully behind her. The wind was getting strong now, blowing her shift as she walked across the roof and to the door leading down into the heart of the building. She walked down ...”

“... G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue. She left her home, I think, with another man – and left her two young daughters. The episode was brief and disastrous – the other man left her in turn, and the husband took her back.’ James then went on to outline the details, as told to him by Lady Gregory, of the ...”

“... pots sitting on the stove, washed but not put away, and the motto supplied by Fairholme Dairy: The Lord is the Heart of Our House. All these things stupidly waiting for the day to begin and not knowing that it had been hollowed out by catastrophe. The door to the side porch had been unlocked. ‘Somebody came in,’ I said. ‘Somebody came in and took ...”

“... followed up with a donation to the Conservative Party), but faced no punishment. Priti Patel, the home secretary, was found to have broken the ministerial code by bullying her staff, driving her most senior civil servant to resign, but again faced no punishment, prompting the resignation of the author of the report, Sir Alex Allen, the independent adviser on ...”