“... and languishing at the close of a sad one’. These traits of spoken language belong to a vulgar household, filled with the clamour of a large family fond of coarse jokes and prone to sentimental effusions. Other households might be more refined, more elegant, but not, the narrator realises, necessarily more suited to the formation of a great ...”

“... discerns most clearly about Athenian life is the tension between polis (the state) and oikos (the household). Women move only in the world of the oikos, but men have access to both. By the fourth century, as the gravestones show, the oikos was the more important. Not that the shift in emphasis accorded women greater rights: they were still regarded as ...”

“... to insert a section devoted to the Bering Straits. In the dozen or so years since the death of Geoffrey Elton, the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s prime minister and plenipotentiary, has been similarly airbrushed out of history. Elton, as anyone who did the Tudors for A Levels or read history at Cambridge between 1950 and 1980 knows, made ...”

“... Arthur Saunders Wolff III, aka Saunders Answell-Wolff III, the ‘Duke’ of Tobias’s brother Geoffrey’s memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979). As the memoirs of both Wolff brothers show, the father spent his life shedding past selves and conceiving new ones – as Unitarian, then Episcopalian, as Groton schoolboy, Yale man (in Skull and Bones), Royal ...”

“... in their stride, along with all those Biblical references. The narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey Tempest, is a self-pitying failed novelist who receives by the same post the news that he has been left five million pounds and a friendly self-introduction from a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimânez. When the superbly poised Prince arrives, the lights go ...”

“... and edited collections of documents in Tudor economic history. But the two works that made him a household name – The Acquisitive Society, published in 1921, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, based on lectures given at King’s College London in 1922, but only published in 1926 – defy strict categorisation.These two remain worth reading, although ...”

“... in life. But it is difficult to see how it will be used by those students of the family and household, and those taking courses in cultural history who have so successfully learned from that account of 1977, and who will be the consistent and enduring audience for the new book. What looks like a helpful signposting in chapter division and sub-division ...”

“... view of things ... He could have passed for a depressed, incurably indolent member of some royal household (there was a look of Prince Theodoric) in hopeless exile.’ Turns up again in 1939 running the Bellevue where Uncle Giles dies, Dr Trelawney gives trouble and General Conyers proposes spending a second honeymoon. Gone forth in his ...”

“... taking up some (although much less than one might expect) of his time. But if that work made him a household name, it did nothing for his academic reputation: Hugh Trevor-Roper, not Taylor, was appointed regius professor in 1957. Quick to feel slighted, Taylor became ever more populist, and for a time limited his commitments at Oxford in order to direct the ...”

“... and an op-ed page without a policy. Only the charm of its obituaries is undiminished although Geoffrey Smith continues to write a wise if ponderous political column. Which leaves the Financial Times, the Independent and the Guardian. The Financial Times is a very good paper. It has replaced the Times in the authority of its features and the influence of ...”

“... all sorts of woman,’ Jo says – and so is Jo. ‘My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it.’I can’t think of another play that gives such an unvarnished portrait of the exigencies of motherhood: of what mothers give and resent giving, of what daughters learn and hate learning. Helen isn’t what Donald ...”

“... a week … if you would tolerate me for any period you like to name … as a member of your household’. Aiken accepted the role of literary mentor, and Lowry’s father, a Methodist Liverpool cotton broker who was already alarmed at his youngest son’s taste for alcohol and eager to see him usefully occupied, willingly came up with the money to send ...”

“... opportunist, some earnest and candid about being incomplete. The biographies by Graham McCann and Geoffrey Wansell, both published in 1996, were steps in the right direction. There are memoirs, like Maureen Donaldson’s An Affair to Remember (1989); or Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant (2011) by Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife and the mother of his only ...”

“... NW1. This was a period when stripped pine was in its infancy and the customary objects of such a household – the jelly moulds, the cane carpet-beaters, the Seth Thomas clocks and Asian Pheasant plates – were still unexplored, tallboys unstripped and the nightdress potential of Edwardian shrouds not yet fully exploited. My own house was of course stuffed ...”

“... capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the world’, at a time when, as Alexander Zevin points out in Liberalism at Large, it was demonstrating this responsibility by ...”