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“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... before leaving the town: ‘This is to give notice to all the World that Andrew Tucker and his son John Tucker are Clowns, and Cowards.’ It is his earliest extant manuscript, and is reproduced here along with the portrait of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the ...”

“... and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an ...”

“... sense of how the vast network that linked the battlefield and the home front actually worked. John Bowne of the Washington bureau of the Sanitary Commission, busy with trying to match survivors with bodies at Gettysburg, took on the case of a domestic servant who wrote saying that she thought that she might be not a widow but an abandoned wife and asked ...”

“... ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a philologist. He was Reader then ...”

“... past, an encyclopedia of forgotten modalities for any postal occasion. ‘When I joined,’ said John Colbert, now the CWU’s communications and campaigns manager, ‘you were in a classroom for two months, learning all the different acronyms. There was a postal instruction for everything. What every label meant. At the end of it you had a sorting test. If ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... well as emotional bond: Wittgenstein, who had repudiated Russell’s work in philosophy, and D.H. Lawrence, who had become contemptuous both of his writing and of his character. In helping the Eliots, Russell needed to believe in his purity of purpose. He wanted especially to believe that he was in this case acting in a manner uncontaminated by public ...”

“... desert air and the famous Southwestern ‘light’ – indeed, the whole Stieglitz-O’Keeffe-D.H. Lawrence-Mabel Dodge Luhan-Willa Cather-Pueblo-Cliff-Dwellers-Death-Comes-for-the-Archbishop thing. Maybe we’ll even see Julia Roberts. (The sun-dried actress – a fortysomething Roma tomato in disguise? – has a ranch near Taos.) Our hotel is right on the ...”

“... state and, duly beaming, produced a complete, pornographically-detailed scenario. According to Lawrence Wright, the author of Remembering Satan: Recovered Memory and the Shattering of a Family,1 Ingram had always been given to extremes. A disciplinarian to his children, fanatically thrifty, absorbed in his Church; over-zealous in his work, he handed out ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...”

“... thought necessary, apparently sure of a welcome; yet when it appeared – as in James and Ford and Lawrence and Woolf and Joyce, for example – it was met with suspicion. Forster felt the need for change quite strongly. He complained, even as he was trying to finish A Passage to India, that he was ‘bored by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of ...”

“... Hemingway’s favourite translator and the man who first translated Faulkner and Huxley and Lawrence into Spanish when he was living in Madrid and collaborating with Ortega y Gasset on his Revista de Occidente, a review that changed a culture. And Fernando Ortiz, the anthropologist, the man who coined, among others, the word Afro-Cuban (after which ...”

“... unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of little girls.’ ‘Oh,’ said ...”