“... face the fact that Cuba was not the place he’d remembered. In February 1971 when he ‘returned home’ – not the essential home, but Havana, the adopted home of his devising – he felt himself ‘a different man, in a different country’. A ‘Soviet starch had been ironed into the ...”

“... the puzzle of what exactly you’re supposed to take with you if you might never go back to your home, or if you might die at any moment. I tried to pack my things several times, but in the end we left with our hands almost empty.Before the war, I was a writer. Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together. It’s hard to believe that ...”

“... Zubeidat, after thwarted efforts to translate documents for human rights groups, became a home care worker, later a beautician. With the exception of Dzhohkar, the undoubtedly bright children began to stumble in their new surroundings. Zubeidat, who believed Tamerlan ‘perfect’ and ‘destined for greatness’, no doubt instilled a great deal of ...”

“... However, to large swathes of the left, the idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for the city). Tories are comedy material, like Rik Mayall’s fictional creation of the late 1980s, Alan B’Stard MP. Googling ‘Tory MP’ throws up a rich array of associations, from ...”

“... and it is to make-believe identities in the past rather than the future that we look to find a home for our ideal selves. The return to history, under this optic, appears as a displaced expression of contemporary utopianism. If there is a single issue which has made history seem more relevant, and more contentious, in recent years it is the emergence of ...”

“... hollow cheek too, which grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.That, though, was when they were still ‘speaking’, before my time. Now they mostly monologued and swore at each other’s backs, and he (and I) would slam out of the house and go off between the graves, past the yew tree with a ...”

“... period. All the great Regency writers were aware that the throne was vacant, that constitutions at home and abroad were unsettled – and that the Prince Regent seemed a Lord of Misrule: they did not know when the Great Reform Bill would be passed, as prologue to the stable reign of Victoria. In times like these, Abstract ...”

“... domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a dangerous atheist at home, could use his ‘Machiavellian’ insights to show the Virginian settlers that the Indians could be cowed not only by direct force but by the power of their own imaginations, by myths such as the nightmarish notion that epidemics were caused by ‘invisible ...”

“... 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 ...”