“... sightline of two passing nuns. But it’s all quite gloomy and solitary, as if she’s stuck in an Edward Hopper painting. The effect of reading about the lady is strange; you’re struck by the poignancy of your own mundane rituals, as if, all of a sudden, you were drunk. Brennan wanted to write ‘as though the camera had never been invented’. She’s a ...”

“... houses with mahogany furniture and deep carpets and silent servants; the heavy meals starting with brown Windsor soup and ending with Cabinet pudding; broadcloth and tweed, shooting and croquet and tennis, and holidays in huge hotels in Torquay or the South of France. There is a splendidly evocative picture of Galsworthy ‘in his Oxford rooms’ with a ...”

“... dust clouds boiling into the phantasm of Tiger Woods Design’s golf development – I encountered brown and black men, on foot, parted from their families for three, five, even ten years, and ekeing out an existence on $10 a day or less. When they weren’t too intimidated to talk to me, they had nothing positive to say about their situation: their faces were ...”

“... expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary Cook, who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England ...”

“... a cobbler who was converted after hearing Whitefield and became one of John Wesley’s preachers; Edward Caswall (‘Bethlehem of noblest cities’, ‘See, amid the winter’s snow’), the Tractarian clergyman who followed Newman to Rome; and How, the Bishop of Wake-field (‘It is a thing most wonderful’, ‘For all the saints who from their labours ...”

“... insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he seems, like many famous people who start their careers almost as child prodigies, to have suffered burn-out of his private ...”

“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... Rusk, who would become secretary of state during the Vietnam War. In Holbrooke’s last year at Brown University, before becoming a foreign service officer in Rusk’s department, he compared Rusk to Woodrow Wilson in a term paper. Wilson ‘had a beautiful dream’ of global freedom and peace on the American model, Holbrooke wrote, and ‘it shone in the ...”

“... its objects and expressions, fetishes and fantasies – is shaped by oppression. (Frantz Fanon and Edward Said’s discussions of the erotics of racial and colonial oppression are important exceptions.) Beginning in the late 1970s, Catharine MacKinnon demanded that we abandon the Freudian view of sexual desire as ‘an innate primary natural prepolitical ...”

“... characterised Césaire’s own view of négritude, which he always saw as ‘part of the left’. Edward Said found in it a ‘way beyond nativism’, because it showed that the intense experience of identity can coexist with a determination not to ‘give in to the rigidity and interdictions of self-imposed limitations that come with race, moment, or ...”

“... I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then discovered that the same now unimaginable fiscal laxity that allowed me to claim Supplementary Benefit, as it was then called, also ...”

“... little boys, Arthur and Harold, and their sister Edith, and George Meredith, and Henry Wallis and Edward Nicolls, and all their children, and all the people they knew … The books by George Meredith in fine bindings line shelves … Things remain. Mary Ellen’s pink parasol lies in a trunk in a parlour in Purley … The hair from Shelley’s head that ...”

“... with tigers’. But – like the late antique holy men studied by the historian Peter Brown – these gurus remained involved with the societies they had fled. In the years before his trip to Chicago, Datta went far beyond Bengal, visiting Hinduism’s holiest places. Like the Buddhist lama in Kipling’s Kim, whose ‘search’ for a holy river ...”

“... Southern slave-masters as they deserved. The nation was still almost as hot-blooded as old John Brown had been before the war, a cruel terrorist in the cause of liberty, declaring: ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.’ Such the wild sayings. Gore Vidal merely hints at all this fervour. Lincoln’s political associates rationally ...”

“... he himself had been moulded. Neither parent could get on with their eldest son, Bertie, the future Edward VII, who was not mouldable. He tried hard but had, as his mother put it, a ‘small empty brain’ and persistent discouragement and criticism made him unhappy and rebellious. He was growing up to be a worry and a disappointment. Towards the end of the ...”