“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”