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“... he resembled a prosperous small businessman who liked to remind people he had served a term as lord mayor. He talked too much, a failing exacerbated by his reedy, high-pitched voice with lingering hints of cockney. He was, in a word that cannot now be employed with the double layer of irony it could once carry, ‘common’. In short, he was ...”

“... the writing game, nothing seems as natural as laughter, and nothing as well parsed as dismissal. Lord Curzon was famous for saying a great many untrue things in a very true-sounding way. This makes him a hero of posh prose and many biographies have been written saying how marvellous he was, despite his reputation as an imperialist brute. Superior Person, the ...”

“... her wish comes true. David lets slip that he plagiarised everything his wife wrote – ‘“The Lord is my shepherd,” a fortuitous turn of phrase, I can confess now . . . was haphazardly tossed off by my Bathsheba’ – and hoodwinked future scholars by passing off her psalms as his own. Psalm 23 appears – anachronistically – in Howard Jacobson’s ...”

“... after which Eyre’s career would have continued to flourish. The largest controversy provoked at home by the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier had been about Charles John Canning’s attempts as governor-general to rein back the brutality of the military reprisals. A slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, seven years before formal emancipation, had been visited ...”

“... of all kinds. He attacked his mother’s prime ministers for their sartorial shortcomings: Lord Rosebery was rebuked for dressing like an American and Lord Salisbury for attending the queen wearing the trousers of an Elder Brother of Trinity House (Salisbury had to apologise: he had been preoccupied by ‘some ...”

“... and Edward Bainbridge spent so long in an alehouse that their intended victim rode on by and home, causing them the inconvenience of having to attempt the burglary of a house full of people in order to gain the prize they had missed on the highway. Macfarlane’s final point is that the casualness of the offences was matched by the casualness of the ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... fails to include some of the best things in life. An awareness of this fact is brought home by watching Shakespeare create the dramaturgy of what might be called the context of the context, the play itself. At certain intense moments, time stands still, and being displaces doing. In this sense, Hamlet delays, and never at a moment when his ...”

“... part of the story. When Gilbert Murray got him to write The Problems of Philosophy for the Home University Library, Russell referred to the assignment contemptuously, described it as a ‘shilling shocker’, said it was ‘philosophy for the Midwest’ and intended to enlighten shop assistants: it remains about the best introduction to philosophy one ...”

“... cliffhanger at the end of each episode. The crime is typically murder, usually serial, preferably home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true ...”

“... her. In this regard she isn’t snobbish. She is just as rude about the rare 1836 Madeira that Lord Carnarvon pours her – ‘exactly like petrol’ – as she is about the coronation chicken served her at the opening of some sheltered bungalows in Derbyshire: ‘This looks like sick.’In other respects, her snobbery can reach baroque levels. When her ...”

“... and his party, accused by the Times of having fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous ...”

“... more enterprising characters, who has escaped to work in the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, comes home on leave with habitual expectations, with the intention of standing rounds of drinks and distributing presents; after a few days the excitement dims into a recognition of ‘the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast.’ The great ...”

“... at Santa Marta, none at all in the well-fortified Cartagena, and then shaped their course for home before the hurricane season. But in August, when they were off Cuba, heading for Florida and the Atlantic westerlies, they met with an appalling four-day blow which so battered the Jesus that they had to cut down her upper works: her rudder was much shaken ...”

“... her cold she caught a heat’: well might he sigh, well might he groan! ‘Hierusalem, my happy home’ is missing (Quiller-Couch dated his version 1601), and so is George Herbert, who was only six when the century ended, and whose absence is partly compensated for by William Alabaster’s religious sonnets. Chambers left Donne for the 17th-century ...”