“... San Fernando Valley, complete with piano lessons (‘Yes, this was a white, upper-middle-class childhood at the height of Empire’); his precocious enthralment to horror movies, which tattooed the message that violence and evil were causeless and random, punching black holes into the humdrum everyday; his assertion that the absence of helicopter ...”

“... was good enough cloth for blankets, druggets and shirts. During the First World War, Mark Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mills produced ten million square yards of cloth and employed 2000 people. Millions of soldiers wore Dewsbury-made shirts and spent frightened nights under Spinkwell Mills blankets. The Official Guide to Dewsbury 1957 (a librarian ...”

“... of the Jews’, and envies the faithful. By now, in late 1944, Germany is beginning to lose the war. Rations at Zeitz are cut, and cut again. Bread is down to a quarter loaf, the turnip soup is mostly water and the days of regular Zulage are a memory. For all his ‘good intentions’ and respect for the camp system, Gyuri has been continuously hungry and ...”

“... Clarissa’s initial wanderings, there is an interruption: ‘For it was the middle of June. The War was over.’ It’s not the sort of thing Clarissa would need to tell herself, but there has to be something to tether the writing, to tell us where we are. And though it’s done with words Clarissa might use, the jumble of thoughts that surround this is ...”

“... nephew is asked by a former school chum (now wearing the uniform of a British officer in the Great War), ‘are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?’ The indignant question carefully reproduces one of the few discursive means positively known to have been available in the period for making a claim of gay identity: in ...”

“... in Derbyshire, the oldest of three children. Her parents, both of them good-looking working-class, met on the dance floor and were more interested in their children making things than reading. They seem to have endowed Vivienne with extraordinary confidence from an early age. She wandered about in the Derbyshire countryside, climbing trees and jumping ...”

“... the antagonist of Shakespeare in this clash of interests which is also in some measure a clash of class, culture and ideology. She was certainly a remarkable woman, though she was not strictly speaking a countess, since her husband, Lord John Russell, the son and heir of the 2nd Earl of Bedford, predeceased his father by a few months and so never inherited ...”

“... Sharks are cartilaginous fishes (they have a skeleton made of cartilage, not bone) of the sub-class elasmobranchii, which also includes rays and skates. There are more than four hundred species, ranging from the dwarf lanternshark (about 15 cm) to the whale shark, the biggest fish in the sea (‘Max: possibly 1700-2100 cm’, according to my Princeton ...”

“... a catastrophic disillusionment with himself and with the corrupt hypocrisy of the English ruling class – reflected, he believed, in the fashionable disgust with which his private affairs were treated. ‘I have been more ravished,’ he would write in a letter in 1819, ‘than anybody since the Trojan war.’ That he ...”

“... in the early 1970s, refugees from their turbulent countries, with Folasadé ‘on the run from a war’ and Kweku ‘fleeing a peace that could kill’. They have four children, while Kweku works as a surgeon and Fola sets up a flower stall, which prospers and expands. Parents and children are all Americanised to various degrees, and African mythologies are ...”

“... the Tudor corporation that maintained Britain’s necklace of lighthouses. During the Crimean War, he advises the Admiralty on the feasibility of an attack on the Baltic port of Cronstadt, using ships filled with four hundred tonnes of burning sulphur. He exchanges ideas, papers and compliments with Pickersgill, Dodgson, the chemist Justus von Liebig, the ...”

“... of biryani and mounds of jackfruit.When I returned to the region five years later, it resembled a war zone. Militants opposed to the control of the Buddhist-dominated government in Bangkok had bombed markets, schools, monasteries, police stations and other public buildings; they kidnapped soldiers and local citizens and beheaded innocent people; they even ...”

“... of its consumption – a drink taken by almost everyone but that still has powers of regional and class distinction. There’s ‘afternoon tea’, ‘cream tea’, ‘high tea’ or ‘tea’ as the evening meal; bags v. loose, ‘builder’s tea’ with three sugars in a mug v. weak Earl Grey in ‘Royal Doulton with the hand-painted periwinkles’. The ...”

“... we later learn, ‘that peculiar calm, virgin contempt of the free-born for the base-born’. This class-based understanding of nonchalance was, however, already out of date. In revising Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence removed from it the last traces of the propaganda for a new aristocracy which had driven his writing in the years after the end of the ...”

“... West Saxon version, based on the Chronicle, which begins with King Alfred waging guerrilla war on the Vikings from his hideout at Athelney in 878, then goes on through the English recovery under his many descendants down to Edward the Confessor, and the eventual unification of England under the West Saxon dynasty. How did the story look elsewhere, and ...”