“... 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 ...”

“... only by his sending ‘a muff of gardenias’ to his niece’s coming-out ball. Her parents, Lord and Lady Glenconner, launched their daughter with Austerity-busting splendour. A marquee, a New Look dress from Dior, a pillar of dry ice and she was ‘out’. Out into what is the question that occupies the rest of the book. What is a ...”

“... of the party in a cause that was politically so calamitous.’ These perceptive words by Lord Blake, the foremost historian of the Conservative Party, aptly sum up the handling of the issues of protective tariffs and imperial preference by the Conservative or Unionist Party between 1903 and 1914. These Edwardian years were dominated by the ...”

“... they belong to no society, for all have been uprooted from wherever it was they were once at home. Yet each of these fallen leaves swept along on the stream has its individual contour, even the illusion of an individual purpose, so that although the treatment is taut and remarkably sparing of sentiment, a vast pathos envelops the whole panorama, and ...”

“... localities through his men: by 1789, it represented nothing more than vestigial dues payable to a lord whose protective martial services were no longer required by the peasantry. Moreover, entitlement to these dues could be sold independently of the land to anyone, noble or bourgeois, who wished to invest in this way. Drawing on the earlier work of Philippe ...”

“... keep out, you publishing rascal – or if you do come in, don’t expect to find me at home. Arnold’s last two biographers have been assiduous in turning over the literary remains and, unless Cecil Lang has something up his sleeve, there are no exciting discoveries to be made in the surviving manuscript materials (as his endnotes ...”

“... i.e. avoid extradition to the United States by pleading guilty to a single offence, the drug lord had unaffectedly chosen to do his time in his hometown. Alone among the cabbies I encountered in Colombia, Maurio liked to drive without the accompaniment of the car radio. Also unusually, he wasn’t interested in discussing football and his country’s ...”

“... Van’ (1855) ‘Eighth Hussars Cooking Hut’ (1855) ‘General Estcourt’ (1855) ‘Lord Balgonie’ (1855) ‘Sebastopol from the Mortar Battery’ (1855) ‘Self-portrait as a Zouave’ (1855) ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ (1855) ‘View from Cathcarts Hill’ (1855)PreviousNext The camera’s capacity for transformation makes us ...”

“... he fled Berlin/the Bibliothèque Nationale/was the only place/he allowed himself to feel at home in./It couldn’t be a sanctuary/for it gave him only/a brief passing illusion/of safety that ended/with the German occupation.’ This passage appears as nine lines of verse, divided as above, but without punctuation. I see the point of getting ...”

“... Oxbridge accent of the White Paper is unmistakable, just as the spoken words of Sir Robert, now Lord Armstrong, are cast in prose as firm and reassuring as a handshake at a house party or an armchair at the Reform. This is not a sour or an idle reflection on class in Britain. It is in part an admiring recognition of the extraordinary way in which Britain ...”

“... hazardous occupations known. ‘It is better,’ the fisherman’s father liked to say, ‘to be home wishing you were at sea than at sea wishing you were at home.’ Or as the Psalmist put it: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, That do business in great waters, These have seen the works of the ...”

“... with the autobiographies of W.H. Hudson, Forrest Reid, Eleanor Farjeon, Christopher Milne and Lord Berners, and ‘The Child at Home’, discussing Victor Gollancz, Augustus Hare, Stephen Spender, Winifred Foley and Neville Cardus. These categories are speculative instruments rather than immutable structures, and they ...”

“... Callaghan, then Prime Minister, just before the 1979 General Election, as the two men were driving home to Downing Street in the official Rover: You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves ...”

“... Horatio why he has come back from Wittenberg, Horatio replies, ‘a truant disposition, good my lord’; to which Hamlet replies: ‘I would not have your enemy say so.’ Hamlet can’t accept this description of his friend, which he calls ‘your own report against yourself. I know you are no truant.’ In Hamlet’s view, it’s a terrible thing to call ...”

“... a young man quits his father’s Wall Street firm and retreats to the family’s New England home, where he wanders aimlessly before taking part in a drunken game of Russian roulette that kills a childhood friend. In Partisans (1955), the son of a US diplomat also resists entering the family trade, under the sway of what’s called in the book only ...”