“... said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The first account, written the following day, was to his mother. He explained to her that he had, after much consideration, decided to return to the hotel and miss his train, as he did not want Wilde to think he was avoiding him. ‘This terrible man,’ he wrote, ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation ...”

“... by the Roman Church; the most salient example would have been Pius V’s excommunication of Queen Elizabeth in 1570, which put English Catholics like Donne’s family in the dangerous position of having to choose between their sovereign and their pope. It may seem surprising that Donne felt able to handle such weighty ...”

“... was an earlier staple in his reading, the deeds of bold knights of chivalry. Our Lady the Mother of God became the object of his chivalric devotion, and once he was able to limp along the roads of Spain, he sought her in prayer during a whole night spent before her image in her shrine at Montserrat, outside Barcelona. So far not much else was clear ...”

“... by others, and by himself, as ‘having no skin’. He had been a bit of a hysteric and a drama queen from early in life, given to fainting dead away when in emotional distress or faced with conflict, even having psychosomatic epileptic seizures, as often as not to subdue his ‘difficult’, possessive ...”

“... When T. was four or five, he wanted to be a binman: ‘You get to make a hell of a mess.’ His mother was a lab technician at a secondary school and his father a civil engineer but he had ‘never been able to apply myself in an academic situation. So it took me three years to do half-decent at my A levels, whereas my sisters both cracked on, knuckled down ...”

“... and its surrounding countryside becomes, for a boy born of a German father and a Cashubian (Slav) mother, a part of his intimate personal history. As a member of the German lower middle class that was particularly receptive to the new racist and nationalist ideas, at the age of ten he entered the ‘Jungvolk’, from which he was promoted to the Hitler ...”

“... ten years older and, in some ways, Hal’s opposite – the neglected child of an alcoholic single mother, a high-school dropout and painkiller addict, who is known to his so-called friends as BIM (for Big Indestructible Moron) – who yet has transformed himself, by the time we meet him, into a man heroically determined, with the support of Alcoholics ...”

“... a mistress in a Liverpool slum. Episodes describing the boy’s retrieval by his father after his mother dies in abject poverty frame a story otherwise set largely in postwar Britain, about the children of an inter-racial marriage, one of whom goes missing. (The story’s primary historical context is the Moors murders of the 1960s.) Phillips is well aware ...”

“... in Belfast, was shot dead by the IRA while off duty. For more than thirty years, Andy and his mother, Martha, have been waiting for the British state to properly investigate Tony’s murder. For most of that time they have felt completely alone in their endeavour. In May 2022, legislation was making its way through Parliament that made it more likely than ...”

“... with her family. Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Sturt Marten, was a goddaughter of the QueenMother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran ...”

“... of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the year of Kazin’s Christmas report, the ...”

“... Caligula and Nero, he had a weakness for horrible women: his last wife, Agrippina, Nero’s mother, set about getting her son the throne by poisoning Claudius once he had adopted Nero. After Nero came to power he murdered Claudius’ son Britannicus; and then, before he was 16, Nero married Claudius’ daughter Octavia. Thus the pathetic Octavia was ...”

“... of background Channon yearned for: a Nicolson baronetcy had been created by Charles I, and on his mother’s side he was related to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Where some people reinvent themselves to disguise a lowly upbringing, Channon tried desperately to shed his origins as the son of a rich shipowner – ‘I have put my whole life’s force into ...”

“... she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local boys referred to Grenfell Tower as ‘the Moroccan flats’. ‘It was ...”