“... afternoon we drive to see the Taos Pueblo – the ‘longest continuously inhabited settlement in North America’. The pueblo is a strange and dusty desert encampment by a stream: a massing of ancient-looking adobe huts in varying states of dilapidation. Ratty dogs run free everywhere; they don’t seem to belong to anyone. The Pueblo Indian residents have ...”

“... I, and perhaps both of us, had suffered through my father’s reticence. We were on holiday in North Wales, where we had taken for the summer the upper part of a rambling 19th-century castle, and, one late afternoon, various members of a large and famous Bloomsbury family, children and grandchildren of the old lady to whom the house belonged, had settled ...”

“... her sister Maria, and is remembered for clinging on to her Cornwall habits in the cold and windy north: wearing silk dresses and clipping around the stone floors in her pattens. We meet Tabby and the other servants, the curates and the local families with whom the Brontës interacted. The Diary Papers introduce all their beloved pets; cats and dogs ...”

“... September, and had made an additional $72 million in 2001 from his stock options.) On 25 July, John Rigas, the former head of Adelphia Communications, was arrested, along with his two sons, on corporate crime charges. They were accused of using the company ‘as the Rigas family’s personal piggy-bank’, spending hundreds of millions of the ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

“... in the poor country regions of the South like Mississippi and in the vast urban sprawls of the North and West. There are children who get no food during the day, no measles shots, no health care. The offer of prenatal health care would save multitudes of wanted babies, and give them and their mothers a chance at life. The pro-lifers are not against ...”

“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”

“... unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of little girls.’ ‘Oh,’ said ...”