“... June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious about his private life, and isn’t it enough just to talk about his profession.Finally, Richard Gere settles into an armchair and remains motionless, staring straight ahead, his nobleman profile tilted ever so ...”

“... with George W. Bush? Why did the highways to all men give way to those heavy fields in back of home? Christian Pentecostalists and Wahhabite Muslims alike think they know God, and that their particular boundaries are imbued with universal spirit and meaning. These boundaries must be fought for, plainly, rather than relying on mathematical reason for an ...”

“... all come from ‘Consider This and in Our Time’, written in 1930, and may well be there to push home the message that we’re going to the dogs. But the staged apocalypse feels serendipitous, chancy, thrilling.Hardy, Eliot and Yeats loomed large in Auden’s pantheon, but he wasn’t about to be co-opted into anyone else’s story of tradition and the ...”

“... had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug ...”

“... for the Boat Race. Go via Midhurst to look at the Camoys tombs in St George’s Church, Trotton. Lord Camoys was a veteran of Agincourt where he commanded the left wing; he married Hotspur’s widow and both of them are buried in a massive and inconveniently placed tomb at the east end of the centre aisle, smack in front of the altar. There’s another much ...”

“... mother, or indeed their father. This idea that the sisters have to be removed from the family home for the novel to proceed makes the role of their uncle and aunt essential in the book. Austen feels free, on the other hand, to make Lady Catherine de Bourgh both imperious and comic, her wealth and power serving to make her ridiculous rather than ...”

“... who make a profession of society; a perfectly instinctive snob. Knows everyone; lunches with Lord Lascelles; has taken the measure of it all exactly; nothing to say; proficient; surly; adept; an unattractive type, with all his talk of Lords and Ladies, his belief in great houses; something of a gorged look, which connoisseurs have; as if he had always ...”

“... deal as a way of holding onto short views. Where the old nature history was parochial, whether at home or abroad (Selborne or Torquay), today’s literary ecology brings the news of the world. It is ambitious, amateur without being learned, nomadic without being leisurely, and the nature it mediates for our inert spectatorship has no norms, only ...”

“... to protect what they see as the higher interests of the nation. Mubarak may have fled to his home on the Red Sea but activists continued to be followed by the same internal intelligence agents as before. Whatever was happening at the top, the deep state remained intact. When revolutionary protesters ransacked sensitive government offices, security ...”

“... 4600 prisoners of war from Judah, deported to the rivers of Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, to go home after fifty years in detention. A ‘king’ of Babylon called Belshazzar, the story goes, made a feast for a thousand of his nobles and served it on the gold and silver vessels plundered by ‘his father Nebuchadnezzar’ from the Temple in ...”

“... for this exotic import far exceeded supply and its proponents began to look for sources closer to home. There was a ready supply of human remains in the corpses of condemned criminals, which – after serving as objects of demonstration for the new science of anatomy – could be turned over to an apothecary for processing into mummy. The French physician ...”

“... authors. ‘By warding off the Jews,’ he said, quoting Hitler, ‘I struggle for the work of the Lord.’Still, the Nazis didn’t consider him tough enough, even when he came up with a legal basis for Germany’s territorial expansion. He fell from favour. After the war he was detained by the Americans and the Soviets, responded to interrogation with ...”

“... The Scottish Reformation, though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white ...”

“... Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he couldn’t remember whether the entire board had been ...”

“... made very clear. Nonetheless schoolmates and I were duly instructed to bring cut flowers from home – the bottoms of the stems to be moistened with a wrapper of wet tissues in aluminium foil. My mother obliged – I’m not sure how, given that nothing very posy-like grew in the leftover building rubble around our house. And intriguing, too, the break in ...”