“... likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three minutes ...”

“... everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with ...”

“... haunted Boston, devouring and copying the treasures in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, even getting a little basic training at night from the New School of Design. Later he would promulgate more lies about having studied at the more prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, or graduated from Brown University. Daily life ...”

“... He also found a new job as secretary of the United Liberal Club, which welcomed both Liberals and Home Rulers at a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss ...”

“... decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious ...”

“... bill of rights, part of the original policy behind the 1996 consultation paper Bringing Rights Home, which introduced the Human Rights Act. Now that the rights included in the European Convention on Human Rights have been brought home, is it time to start a family of new rights, and possibly of duties, to go with ...”

“... designed for China, or meant to explain China to the British. The strong views he had brought home on the China situation were unlikely to be pleasing to his superiors; he had no time for Chiang Kai-shek or his American supporters, and insisted on the evidence of his own eyes that the Communist armies had, at this stage anyway, been welcomed by the ...”

“... a hand-rolled edge’), ornithology (Cumberland Island, where the wedding took place, is home to ‘over three hundred species of birds’) and nomenclature (‘Gogo’ Ferguson, the family friend! Narsico, the exquisitely named dress designer!) … But none of the snippets meted out about Bessette Kennedy … appeared to provide the key to ...”

“... the man to be lodged until he recovers, the town thought to be a representation of the painter’s home, Bassano near Venice. So many paintings in galleries are populated by the beautiful and the perfectly proportioned that it’s a relief to find one of this date (mid-16th century) where the characters are so downright ordinary. These are not gods, or ...”

“... simple to expose when they strayed on to the ground of defence and diplomacy, where he was most at home. The parochialism of their outlook was clearly visible through the eirenic rhapsodies of their characteristic domestic delusion, which they also extended to international affairs: the belief that economic rationality must somehow draw political rationality ...”

“... could be formed other than of particular folks. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs brings home the way in which tradition and the individual talent can converge in that astonishing thing, a well-nigh instant authentic tradition. ‘It is a reflection of the proverb’s vitality that new ones are continually being created’; on the other hand (a ...”

“... he did’, whereas Louis B. Mayer wants to see ‘the good, wholesome, American mother in the home’ (that second comma registering how ‘American’ is to ring out against everything ‘un-American’). There had been a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours ...”

“... now as they were then; they include a smaller number in which the rhythm drives the words home in a masterly fashion. It was these which first established MacDiarmid in my mind as one of the few contemporary poets who really mattered to me. Even so, it was evident that much the best poem in the volume was the ‘Second Hymn’ itself, and in that poem ...”

“... internationalist, addicted to thirty-mile walks in his oldest tweeds, he might have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been ...”

“... place for him, does Scottie’s vertigo speak to a deeper uneasiness? Scottie is played by James Stewart (which would usually be comforting). He was fifty when the film was made. A man of that age should be mature, but Scottie is unresolved. He went to nearby Stanford, he showed promise of bigger things, but now he’s a pensioned-off cop, with cracks in his ...”