“... an Arcady, the safe place at the other end of everything. That’s how it is echoed in the dark north European limbo of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, as in the East German conversations Wolf writes about in Cassandra.Ambrose Bierce’s old frivolity can be profitably re-worked. The problem with national commemoration is that it returns the place to island ...”

“... Robert Megaw was shot when his patrol was ambushed in Edward Street in Lurgan. And Constable John Forsyth was blown up in Market Street on 18 June 1974. There have been many others. The RUC is currently 93 per cent Protestant. The action of Loyalist informers and double agents in Northern Ireland has often involved them in liaising between the Loyalist ...”

“... An eldest sister​ was born in the North, daughter of a judge who never lied and a scholar who always did. That was A.S. Byatt. Christened Susan, what on earth, she was later known as Dame Antonia. Byatt wrote about sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny ...”

“... sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for ...”

“... His coffin was first removed to the garrison church, where thousands of people – including Dr John Buckley, the bishop of Cork and Ross – filed past to pay their respects. The funeral echoed the reinterment of Roger Casement – thrown in a lime pit in Pentonville Prison in 1916 and repatriated in 1965 – when Eamon de Valera got out of his sickbed to ...”

“... was no response in kind.’ Until his death in Canada aged 64, Jackson was the emotional north of Housman’s life. After Oxford both men worked in the Patent Office, and shared rooms until at some point in 1885 there was a crisis and a brief rupture, before or during which most of the poems in A Shropshire Lad got written. Jackson went to India in ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... ever nearer, began a slow retreat in the searing summer heat. On 26 June at Samarra (fifty miles north of modern Baghdad) the rear of the Roman marching column, then straggling over four miles, was suddenly attacked. Julian rushed to bring reinforcements. In his haste he did not stop to strap on full body armour. The Romans forced the Persians to fall ...”

“... If there was a single figure whose ideas seemed pertinent in that deeply ambiguous moment, it was John Maynard Keynes. The implosion of the financial system vindicated him against his critics, who had declared markets self-stabilising and government intervention counterproductive. With trade, investment and consumption collapsing and millions cast into ...”

“... that it was, somehow, their home. Johann Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and ...”