“... 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 ...”

“... the London Agreement of April 1987, signed at a secret meeting between Peres and Hussein at the home of Lord Mishcon in London. The agreement envisaged an international conference with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and negotiations on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338. Peres read the agreement to Shamir but ...”

“... past a green tree overhanging the road, the car can be seen disappearing into the distance. The home returns the mother’s gaze; in a kind of shot/ reverse shot, the glance of farewell is reciprocal. This occurs towards the end of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), which centres on a family in a Texas town in the 1950s. The use of voiceover is ...”

“... retreats in Northumberland, where grown men and women wept and writhed, raised their arms to the Lord, played guitars, and spoke in tongues.And it was not yet strange that this essentially fortunate family was so weirdly asymmetrical. On my mother’s side, there were the usual things: grandparents and cousins, photographs, heavy unwanted pieces of furniture ...”

“... in its way, was a reply. I was eight; I knew the game.I have no memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny brass latch, into which I had put IMPORTANT THINGS: a charm in the form of a watermill whose wheel actually turned, a bright red gobstopper ...”

“... women had made a concession, not just in going to showrooms rather than being attended to at home, but in accepting the notion of the ‘designer’, of being dictated to by a genius and subscribing to a brand (Worth was the first to sew his name into garments). By the time Champcommunal was there in the late 1920s, Maison Worth wasn’t the only atelier ...”

“... Her grandfather was governor of Mauritius during the 1850s. I imagine he would have felt quite at home in J.G. Farrell’s Krishnapur.Two years before Molly was born, the Skrines sold up in Alberta and moved, first to Kildare, and finally to Ballyrankin House in County Wexford, where the five little Skrines were brought up with nannies and governesses and ...”

“... widespread at such high levels that not much could be done to check it. One American general sent home 166 crates and boxes full of valuable antiques in a single shipment. ‘Fraternisation’ with Germans was a t first proscribed for Allied soldiers; of course that broke down. Botting believes that concubinage was ‘universal’ in the first two years after ...”

“... networks became dense enough to enable people above a certain income level to choose their home on the basis of where it’s nicest to live rather than nearness to their workplace. Pretty towns with good amenities became prettier and better served still; neglected towns more neglected. Towns that could tick three or four from a list of teaching ...”

“... friend of Proust and Maeterlinck; Olive Custance, known as ‘Opale’, who subsequently married Lord Alfred Douglas (the Wilde thing again). Yet however paradoxically, Barney’s major attachments – the two or three that really mattered to her – seemed simply to underscore again the grisly old law of lesbian thermodynamics: there aren’t enough of us ...”

“... affair with Rodolphe. In Flaubert’s notes for the novel, he has her on one occasion returning home across the fields ‘le foutre dans les cheveux’ – with spunk in her hair. The book’s readers were spared this detail.A Single Word …changes everything. In Perrin’s lexicon there are 834 uses of the possessive article son, and 817 of du. In Part ...”

“... in an era of populist demagoguery. Trump, Putin, Modi, Orbán: Netanyahu could hardly be more at home in a world of nationalist strongmen. Without giving up an inch of occupied land, he has won over Sunni Arab states paralysed by fear of Shia Iran, fed up with the Palestinians and incapable of exerting pressure on Israel. Palestinian resistance in the West ...”

“... to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of novella length, from titillating near porn to thrillers to ...”