“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets were better over ...”

“... think in the autumn of 1956 when I was 12, I was eavesdropping on an after-dinner conversation at home. My sister, assorted cousins and I had been asked nicely to occupy ourselves elsewhere. Obediently, we moved to an adjoining room, but then listened, giggling, to a particularly raucous, wooden-headed aunt and a bony uncle berating my parents in loud ...”

“... When you’ve sung Purcell’s unfinished fragment from the early 1680s, ‘Hear my Prayer, O Lord’, a two-and-a-half minute howl in C minor, relentlessly unfurling its dissonance and grinding chromaticism, you’ve heard everything that’s important in music, and can skip straight to the 20th century. Or so it seemed to me. My sister was studying the ...”

“... dilapidated. Onegin roots through the cupboards. He finds nothing but an accounts book, some home-made fruit liqueurs, jugs of cider and an ancient calendar. A terrifying chasm yawns between the countryside and Petersburg, the city of new ideas, literature, books, journals and frenetic scribblers: Onegin notices there isn’t a spot of ink anywhere. In ...”