“... Cather never doubts that we can perceive the splendour as she depicts it. They are letters home, like the letters to Philomène. One is in the land, the other in the domestic sphere; the free eagle to the nest, the home to the world. Letters from William to Willa, and back.If it is all substance, running in its ...”

“... of madness on this side of the Channel remained ad hoc and un-systematic, with most madmen kept at home or left to roam the countryside, while that small fraction who were confined could generally be found in the small ‘madhouses’ which made up the newly-emerging private ‘trade in lunacy’. There was no English ‘exorcism’ of madness; no serious ...”

“... one day, perhaps, you will notice that the house you are defending is empty and nobody has been at home for years. Meanwhile you are here in the half-dark with the patriote isolé. ‘Millions of French people were brought up in the worship of Robespierre,’ says François Crouzet in an essay here. How is it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of ...”

“... is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them. A lot has been made of her ability to function on four hours’ sleep a night. Moore indicates that this is something of a myth. No, she didn’t sleep much, but often this made her tetchy ...”

“... they’d taken the island from the Dutch in the Napoleonic wars, found there was only one local lord left to deal with. King Vikrama Rajasinha believed he could hold the city of Kandy, which is situated in the jungle of the central highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British ...”

“... city are more likely to be found notorious in the country.We made a trip into Glasgow to a care home on the Crow Road, where Edwin Morgan was then living and writing. He and I had corresponded when he left his old flat and lost his library. I sent him some books and we agreed to see each other in Glasgow. Eddie was a city man. He was a city poet. It must ...”

“... 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 ...”