“... have a lot of royalty in it: Norman Hartnell’s wide Winterhalter neckline for the Queen Mother, Catherine Walker’s high-collared Elvis-in-Vegas number, made for Diana in 1989. But I was surprised to notice how personally people seemed to greet the outfits – how familiar they were and in a weird way, loved. ‘The family provides the central structure of ...”

“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... Voltaire broke with Frederick in 1753, and turned his attention to the Romanovs: entranced by Catherine II’s promise to publish the Encyclopédie after it was censored by the French authorities, he marvelled in a letter to Diderot that ‘it is France that persecutes philosophy! And it is the Scythians who show it favour!’ Over the next two ...”

“... penis and have to abandon fantasies of maleness, they feel envy and a lasting sense of alienation. Catherine Robson acknowledges and dismisses Freud and Lacan as forming ‘part of the continuing mythology of the creation of interiorised selves, a mythology to which this book aims to contribute one particular narrative’. In the story Robson tells, it’s the ...”

“... but there are also two aunts: Elizabeth Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner and Mr Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It is an aspect of Austen’s genius that, while the novel negates the power and influence of Elizabeth’s mother, neutralises her by being both comic and blunt, the two aunts are painted in considerably different shades, one allowed a ...”

“... muddy underfoot, an illicit delight. It’s warm and windless, the stones of the abbey sodden and brown from the amount of moisture they’ve absorbed. Spectacular here are the toilet arrangements, the reredorter set above a narrow chasm with a stream still running along the bottom. Unique, though (or at least I haven’t seen another), is the tannery ...”

“... and demeanour, going so far as to caption one photograph: ‘Sofia Marie changed her dark brown hair to blonde because it looks more angelic’. Mass communications, and their prime instrument, the photograph, have proved crucial in the history of supernatural phenomena. The Martin sisters had a plate camera in the convent and passed happy hours of ...”

“... and is living in Notting Hill with the Feddens: Gerald and Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. He is about to start a PhD on Henry James’s style at UCL. Toby Fedden was a contemporary of Nick’s at university: they weren’t exactly friends, but Nick had a crush on him. Gerald is the newly elected Tory MP for Barwick, a town in ...”

“... up under the Măcin mountains. The whitewashed Orthodox monasteries stand out against the faded brown of late winter. They are the destination for some refugees: anyone with room to spare is encouraged to offer it up. The government sends people on to Bucharest, for instance, if they want to continue their journey. But otherwise it’s the luck of the ...”

“... virtually absented herself from London altogether. She found consolation in the company of John Brown, and Thompson suggests that there was more to Victoria’s involvement with her Highland servant than it has been usual to suppose. Inevitably, there was widespread and growing dissatisfaction at the Queen’s non-performance of her public duties. Dowager ...”

“... a child, Sinéad preferred her own company, and the company-not-company of books: Maeve Binchy, Catherine Cookson, Oscar Wilde and more daring authors, such as Edna O’Brien, who were on her father’s ‘forbidden list’. She lost her taste for reading as an adult because she ‘couldn’t concentrate on other people’s stories’, but she scrutinises ...”

“... directly before or afterwards, I don’t remember which. I went shopping supposedly to find a brown jumper to wear with the neat black skirt suit I had packed in my bag from London; the suit I had bought a couple of months before for a wedding, with the idea of looking like Mary Archer. In the event, though, I didn’t find the right ...”

“... of the commodity of public sorrow is to be applauded, along with the brilliance of her writing,’ Catherine Taylor wrote in the Telegraph. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the novel’s ‘extraordinary emotional ballast’, and Claire Messud added that it was ‘a necessary and valuable gift’. But a sentence like ‘Southern California was ...”

“... As it happened, the Red Army got there first. The magnificent walls of the Amber Room, in the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, were dismantled and sent to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, whence they disappeared at the end of the war, never to be seen again). The crudeness of German methods in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was remarkable compared to their ...”

“... from song-thrush and cuckoo which I heard only. The ground was peopled by their nests and eggs: brown-blotched seagreen of a black-backed gull inside the circular foundation of a ruined cairn; black-spotted brown of a snipe, which fled away in zig-zags when I went for an early morning wash in the burn; ...”