“... of providing a future for their children. Of course my grandmother’s story and my research may not really contradict one another. Flatt may have first defended the acquisition of land, and later thought it was becoming excessive. But at least my anecdote demonstrates something relevant to Witi Ihimaera’s ...”

“... could accept with equanimity the death at sea of several hundred sailors simply because – if I may borrow that phrase – they came from a country with which we were in dispute and which had a tradition of putting up too readily with dictatorial regimes. And if there are those who find it distasteful to talk in the same breath, as though that puts them on ...”

“... itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity – not infallible, for it may do wrong; but irresistible.’ And in 1776 Bentham launched his attack on ‘unmeaning’ statements: there were no ‘assignable bounds to the supreme power’ in a state. ‘To say that there is any act that they [Parliament] cannot do, to speak of any ...”

“... or flagrantly unreliable evidence. Her end is predictably murky. Octavian, so the cynical say, may well have publicly paraded his disappointment at Cleopatra’s premature end, but surely he had enough guards and thugs at his disposal to have prevented her death had he really wanted to. You don’t need to go so far as to argue – and Chauveau does ...”

“... North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man ...”

“... were cordoned off in separate, inferior waiting rooms in bus terminals and train stations. On 4 May, a group of 18 activists, black and white, men and women, all members of CORE, ventured south from Washington, heading to New Orleans. Their journey, dubbed the ‘Freedom Ride’, took them through the upper South, where their affront to Jim Crow was mostly ...”

“... as Titian proved, accurate drawing and minute detail are not a sure way to naturalness, and may even preclude the transition from seeing patches of paint to having an impression of a living face. Compare Holbein’s portraits – true, I am willing to guess, in contour and complete to every whisker of stubble – with Titian’s most persuasive ones, or ...”

“... give of her life – as they dominate her writing. Their circumstances and their resourcefulness may vary a little, but almost all Jean Rhys’s heroines, both in her novels and in her short stories, suffer from a similar incapacity to wake up from a dream. They know this about themselves, but the world seems to them too harsh and they lack the ‘nous’ to ...”

“... what innumerable doctors have had to say about it. This historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was ...”

“... service personnel had imperial backgrounds.) That such activity was reviled in mainland Britain may, perversely, have aided its development; if it had been more generally accepted it could have been monitored and controlled. But the existence of MI5, SIS and GCHQ was formally admitted only in the 1980s, and Aldrich gives several examples of GCHQ’s hiding ...”

“... Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who ...”

“... from them, the Major Government has slowly but inexorably moved towards the second option. This may prove to be an impossible task: as, indeed, it deserves to be, since only one member of the present Cabinet can show a clean pair of hands. But the choice has been made. The Conservative Party is engaged in breaking with the recent past. It is a process that ...”

“... aversion to the Eye certainly seems to have been different from the conventional dislike. It may have touched off fears of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against himself. ‘ “Is your aim to smash Private Eye?” he was asked. “No,” Goldsmith snarled, leaning across and jabbing his finger at me. “I only want them to be more ...”

“... a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of dear Margot. (‘Emma’, presumably, would have posed a dilemma for both of them.) Gladstone also resorted to ‘far go’, but won higher marks by extending his ‘argot’ to embrace ...”

“... a novel representation of the culture of distance. It has led to much impatience, but then it may eventually be seen that the systematic exhaustion of patience has been part of the inner history of these events. The long, slow approach to the islands was a material reality. But then: to go all that way and do nothing? To hear those discussions night after ...”