“... way and Southey settled for her younger sister. When brother and sister-in-law were sharing Greta Hall later in life, they both seem to have regretted missing each other, and Southey had some hard things to say about the deceased wife’s sister act. On the other hand, one doubts Sara ever really regretted becoming Mrs Coleridge, although she used to talk in ...”

“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... forewoman in a sweet factory, goes beyond ‘jingoistic sentiments … paraded in the music hall and the public house’, Glover writes. ‘Here is an anti-semitism that is ready to leave the street corner for the political platform, to make its stand as something other than vulgar prejudice.’ It was fuelled by the popular perception that Jews ...”

“... He belonged, by natural kinship, in the company of high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over ...”

“... journalist Marchamont Nedham. All of these have been eclipsed in the recent preoccupation with James Harrington, the author of Oceana (1656), and his followers. The republicanism that emerges from Norbrook’s investigations is thus not confined to the militant saints and to those preoccupied with securing a Harringtonian ‘balance’ through ...”

“... some broken chunks of polystyrene. A second soldier comes into view, too busy firing down the hall to help his comrade.Another video selfie shows a man with a dirt-splattered face lying in a crater in a snow-covered field. He wears a Russian tankman’s headgear, with its distinctive padded strips. ‘Hi everybody,’ he says to the camera. ‘I’m in a ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning suggest, as a mutation of county philistinism rather than a populist affectation.* His social liberalism, when not merely the product of good manners, seems to be a recent acquisition, while his mind-broadening PR job at Carlton TV was, Elliott and ...”

“... looking for his copy of Nine Stories, on the inside cover of which he had made a list of the James Bond-style gadgets his grandfather had developed before being deployed in Europe. The book is there but the inside cover is blank, the tiny mystery solved when he works out that he and his first wife both had a copy of the book, and had inadvertently ...”

“... which I suppose was handy for the courts, still functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if they were neglected. It’s a High ...”

“... them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags. Going, going. Gone. But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is she? And who was she before all ...”

“... way . . . In fact, the coach in question is quite a good coach and will probably end up in the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He and Henry are almost exactly alike as human beings. It’s not unusual for people to talk this way to Frank. After all, he used to be a writer, and it sometimes seems that almost everyone he meets thinks that that makes it OK for ...”

“... walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do ...”