“... Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. She looked back over her shoulder, laughing with the jolly tea-lady, as she scooshed the big syringe. Attend! I wanted to say to her, though she hardly needed to. Here, I’ll do it. I’ll kill the infection. I’ll do it with attention. Prayerfully, if you like. The bed where the woman had read her paperback and the man ...”

“... diary was his rash marriage to his penniless French wife, Elizabeth. His amicable intimacy with Lady Sandwich is also described delicately and tactfully, as is the comfortable expediency of his erotic relations with the loose-living Betty Lane and her sister Doll. Tomalin conveys too, as no previous biographer has done, the resilience and the spirit of the ...”

“... art. In the era of Sir Giles, a dash of Spanish Gothic entered the equation, as in his exquisite Lady Chapel at Liverpool Cathedral. These things go unnoticed, however, because foreign motifs were blended into the later churches of the Gothic Revival without the ostentation of the mid-Victorians. The third of Scott’s major churches is a disappointment. In ...”

“... apple crate, sweating in a black suit, who began pleading to his brothers and sisters; an old bag-lady retrieving a carnation from a bin to put in her hair.’ There are always things to be noticed, things that stand out: Smith doesn’t invariably look for them. Sometimes, though, the writing works beautifully. There’s a scene in which Alsana, Clara and ...”

“... Foundation inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The members of this committee (chaired by Lady Runciman) are essentially pragmatic: It has become inescapably clear to us that the eradication of drug use is not achievable and it is not therefore either a realistic or a sensible goal of public policy. The main aim of the law must be to control and ...”

“... and that our ‘modern stereotype of grandmothers is more nearly a smiling white-haired old lady bearing Christmas presents than a wiry forager lugging large tubers critical for warding off starvation.’ According to Hawkes’s theory the menopause doesn’t require any special explanation: great apes may cease breeding altogether at about the age of ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... want to borrow your flat at times like the early evening, for an hour or two, to entertain a young lady’; ‘I used you as an alibi on Friday afternoon – you know I’d do the same for you any old time, eh?’)? And how was it that Amis became the piss-frothing Dylan Thomas’s literary executor? And what is this limerick about Christopher Ricks that ...”

“... authority by challenging the central tenet of monotheism itself. Pacelli became a devotee of Our Lady of Fátima and the legends of Fátima and Lourdes bulked far larger in my childhood than anything to do with the Bible – and since these legends depended on visions of the Virgin, it was not long before Pacelli announced that he had been having visions ...”

“... some of them detailing Thackeray’s illicit passion for Mrs Brookfield. His daughter Annie, now Lady Ritchie, did her best to counter this with a series of ‘biographical introductions’ attached to the Centenary Memorial Edition of her father’s work. The paternal prohibition was breached. In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on ...”

“... liberated, Peggy has discovered reading and been much disappointed by the end of The Portrait of a Lady, but all the adventures and annoyances have quietened now, and everyone is amused and in good humour. James says: ‘This was my mother’s dream for us.’ ‘That we would end up in England?’ William asks. ‘No,’ Henry says, smiling. ‘She always ...”

“... hard-pressed secretaries, who found that Rathbone expected others to work as hard as she did, ‘Lady Astor dictates her letters through the lavatory door.’ Pedersen’s grasp of the Liverpool background seems a little unsure. England possessed no tougher, more violent or more polyglot city, torn by riots and by sectarian tensions. As it became polarised ...”

“... I’m not going to stop people writing what they want. I would say, though, that the lady I knew has changed.’ You would think he had learned by now that women can’t be trusted simply to be beloved without spoiling everything by pooing in the ...”

“... and a woman receiving guests. ‘Go on, my lord and nephew,’ the uncle told him. ‘Kiss this lady, she is your mother.’ With the army ruled out, Talleyrand instead headed into the Church. At the seminary of Saint-Sulpice he paid little attention to his studies, preferring to major in seditious literature and minor in actresses, but these choices proved ...”

“... speculate about the future life her erstwhile fiancé might enjoy without her, with a ‘radiant lady with droves of bullocks on the plains of Meath’. And when father and son depart to make their living out of tale-telling, Pegeen Mike is already structuring a tragic model of the events and their protagonist: ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve ...”