“... friend. Wilbur wrote to the US Weather Bureau, which sent him data on wind velocities in more than a hundred places. One spot stood out: a community called Kitty Hawk, seven hundred miles from Dayton, on a chain of islands and sandbars off North Carolina known as the Grand Banks. Wilbur wrote to the head of the Weather Bureau station on Kitty Hawk ...”

“... much about work; these visits, very often around teatime, gradually became less tutorial and more social. I’d generally take with me a cake from Fullers or some establishment in the covered market, cakes that can have done him no good but which he ate with relish, meringues particularly. I had never come up against as strong a personality as this ...”

“... ceremonial: it was not the actual presents we missed as the want of occasion. Other people made more of their lives than we did. Wanting birthdays, parties and presents was just another instance of the way our family never managed to be like other families. Even where birthdays were concerned we could not achieve ordinariness. We sometimes tried, though. My ...”

“... depends on your rent or your labour for their livelihood, discipline is likely to be enforced more strictly than it is by a distant corporation or municipality. In ‘A Living Network of Relationships’, a speech she gave in 1958 to the New School, Jacobs describes an advertisement for the luxury Park West development: Three apartment towers set upon a ...”

“... of a British soldier in Afghanistan; now over breakfast, he is informed of the deaths of three more servicemen there in a suicide bombing. ‘I felt nauseous,’ he writes. ‘I thought of the families across Britain … who were about to receive a visit; of the moment when the doorbell rings and they already sense the terrible news they are about to be ...”

“... alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the cathedral, we loved to squeeze out those acute ...”

“... Biscay, through the Channel and into the North Sea. It was bound for Hull. By lunchtime on 6 May, more than a month after setting out from Vietnam, it was steaming up the Humber.I wanted to confirm what was on board, so I looked on the internet and found a pub, the Humber Tavern, in the village of Paull, that seemed to have a good view of the water. I ...”

“... to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the finest recent practitioners of the novel in English, admiring in particular the technique ...”

“... foolish to attribute its continued vitality to the very man who has done most to rein it in. For more than fifteen years, Gerry Adams has been coaxing Sinn Fein away from its militarist origins, yet Adams’s achievement has gone unacknowledged and the man himself continues to receive nothing but the lowest insults. ‘I wonder if he was bullied at ...”

“... I was very drawn to. I’m sorry now that we allowed English male shyness to stop us speaking more freely about some of the things that mattered to us most (not that he, ambivalent Manxman, would easily submit to the indignity of being lumped with ‘the English’), but that courtesy of his could sometimes make too much directness seem intrusive. Our ...”

“... casts of her body, and articulated her skeleton. They may be intended as evidence, but they look more like trophies; either way, they are invitations to work backwards, to find out what the child’s life was, and how, in death, she came to be here.She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian Dwarf. Not much is known about her; what ...”

“... point, having no English grammar, I consult a copy of Kennedy’s Latin primer, filched more than thirty years ago from Giggleswick School. It’s only today that I notice that some schoolboy half a lifetime ago has painstakingly converted The Revised Latin Primer into ‘The Revised Man Eating Primer’. Perhaps it is the same boy who has inscribed ...”

“... Ukraine has produced the largest and swiftest mass movement of women since the Second World War. More than four million women have been displaced within Ukraine and around the same number have fled the country. Many of those who left, congregating in towns and cities in Poland, or taking buses and trains to other European capitals, went reluctantly. Their ...”

“... misogyny. When two of them married it came as a great surprise to their friends; they seemed more at home (or more happily desperate) as uneasy bachelors than fathers or husbands. All three, indeed, if this is any of our business, may have died virgins. One of them took the view that ‘I have no ambitions and no ...”

“... ready to return to Dublin and the humblest employment; but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis ...”