“... low-rent Lucifer – and was humming quietly. You’d be so – o – o – o – nice – to come home to! He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking sailors, packed into fresh clean whites and reeking of Old Spice, whom my mother somewhat recklessly dated before she finally got together with Turk in 1967. When I wasn’t riding my skateboard ...”

“... for the Arts and was to play a part in the creation of a new breed of quasi-poor. But what Lord Eccles said chimed with what other people, including economists, were saying. And with this easy elimination of poverty from the mind, it seemed wilfully pessimistic to go grinding on about the have-nots in society – indeed, there was no need to do ...”

“... purview, and also bred people, British in outlook and adventurous by disposition, who felt at home almost anywhere in its world-wide expanse – except in class-riven, social-mountaineering Britain itself. Kipling was one; another was Eric Shipton, born in 1907 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, son of a tea planter who died before Eric was three. His formidable ...”

“... or his saviour. Stephen does not realise it till quite late, not till after he has agreed to come home with Bloom. To feel himself generally doomed, while throwing away his only source of money, with nowhere to sleep that night, is of course only rational. Molly laid out the cards in bed that morning, after Bloom had brought her breakfast, and learned that ...”

“... he had read with his friends in the Iron Guard in the 1970s: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the Devil.”’The new pope was shown his palatial quarters by Georg Gänswein, Ratzinger’s personal secretary and prefect of the papal household. ‘As Gänswein fumbled with the light switch,’ Ivereigh writes, ‘Francis found himself peering ...”

“... overseas, mostly possessions and dominions. A map drawn at the time, and reproduced in a memoir by Lord Woolton, minister of food during the war, as well as on this page, drove home the point that if two or three supply routes were cut, hunger and shortages at home were sure to ...”

“... ability to remember things, but the drivel is different. Georgescu does have a fondness for The Lord of the Rings, the film version, using the sentiments of Gandalf and Galadriel as if they were his own. The most striking appropriation I saw, however, wasn’t from a movie. Filmed meeting voters in the street, Georgescu drew on a speech by the wartime ...”

“... burial. The great violinist had died of cholera in 1840, and his corpse was being taken home to Genoa by his son. But the Genoese declined to let the body ashore for fear of infection, a refusal repeated at Marseille, and then at Cannes, until the son, in desperation, sighted the rugged reef-island of Saint-Ferréol, and stashed his father there in ...”

“... certainly at the start, and in connection with MI5 in particular. (MI5 is the one that works at home; MI6 is the foreign branch. Neither name is any longer the official one: MI5 is now the Security Service; MI6 the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS.) Not everyone knew about it, or was ‘content’. They certainly did not know when MI5 extended its remit ...”

“... of the ancients – especially the triennial voyages with which Solomon’s fleets had fetched home the gold of Ophir, known in Herwart’s time as Peru. Every mythical conveyance – such as Pegasus, the winged horse of Bellerophon – stood for a real ship. And every mythical object with a point – such as the spears of the Greeks at Troy ...”

“... knew how much an ounce of gold cost in the country you were trading with, and how much it cost at home, then you could translate the value of their currency into your own. The emergence of reliable exchange rates facilitated a period of intense global economic integration at the close of the 19th century that was unrivalled until the late 20th century. The ...”

“... that vexed his heart as he sailed the seas, labouring to save himself and to bring his comrades home. But his comrades he could not keep from ruin, strive as he might; they perished instead by their own presumptuousness. Fools, they devoured the cattle of Hyperion, and he, the sun-god, cut off from them the day of their homecoming. Goddess, daughter of ...”

“... collective farm in the rich Stavropol area of southern Russia, led the life of a little ‘country lord’. They all shared in the experience of racial mixing and Russian domination, in which the problem of ethnicity was solved by a unique and once envied form of suppression, disguised by both the pretence and the reality of a general levelling. The Soviet ...”

“... how it felt to be numbered among Godwin’s correspondents. Many of them, I imagine, coming home after an enjoyable or an exhausting day, must have started back in alarm on seeing a letter addressed in Godwin’s hand waiting on the hall table, and deferred opening it until they had steadied their nerves with a glass of something. For among the various ...”

“... MiG. In his introduction to a revised 1997 edition of the novel, he concluded: It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England than of having written famed works. The name de Burun, not yet Anglicised, was inscribed in the Domesday book. Looking back, I feel a ...”