“... and Hollywood played a big part in putting British ‘social consciousness’ drama on the silver screen (The Citadel, the first of Cronin’s novels to be filmed, was an MGM production of 1938; How Green Was My Valley a Darryl F. Zanuck film of 1941). But there was good reason why this narrative should have a special resonance in Britain. The country ...”

“... unity’ were still binding. Remarkably, the villagers of Shilton in Oxfordshire celebrated the Silver Jubilee by gathering at their church under ‘two huge, flaming crosses’ (they then said prayers for the nation, before trooping down to the village pond to sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’). Thatcher, a couple of years later, talked of the country ...”

“... many, many billions of dollars,’ he lied during one of the presidential debates. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he insists that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But, as well as staking him to launch his real-estate career, when the Taj was sinking like Donald’s own private Titanic, Fred Trump rushed to the casino to buy $3.35 million ...”

“... and vanished from the story, leaving him to his drills and shovels. Lyttle posed in the rubble, silver hair combed, neat in open-necked shirt and faded trenchcoat. ‘Artists don’t need to take on a moral tone,’ Russo said. ‘I kind of like the idea of the artist as devil’s advocate.’ But she wasn’t prepared to inflict the Mole Man on the editor ...”

“... the safe and respectable provincial deanery of her upbringing with purloined pearls and family silver, which Mrs Sixsmith promptly undertakes to sell for her.I think that what I loved from the start about Firbank was not only his highly aestheticised world but the way so many of its characteristics come straight (if that’s the right adverb) from the real ...”

“... small bedside clock, a special key for opening first-class compartments on the Southern Railway, a silver cigarette lighter, a few carefully folded five-pound notes, printed, as they were in those days, on the finest transparent paper and held in place by a gold clip, some spare coins, and a small pearl tiepin, which smelled permanently of eau de Cologne. My ...”

“... gaze was Homerically expansive, even taking in the claim, as the anthropologist Bettina Arnold describes it, that the ancient Greeks were actually Germans ‘who had survived a northern natural catastrophe and evolved a highly developed culture in southern contexts’ – a preposterous fantasy, but worth pursuing for archaeologists who coveted ...”

“... addressed him as Mr Marshall. There were two branches, a shop run by my mother dealing in silver, mostly Georgian, and one run by my father dealing in miscellaneous antiques and bric-à-brac. She revelled in her job, especially the buying, which she did with a lot of taste. She was hampered by suffering from angina, which gave her hope that she would ...”

“... had never received such magnificent expression. But such they remained. In England, by the time of Arnold, salvation by art was already the conventional intellectual substitute for faith. In France, Thibaudet would observe in 1926: ‘The 19th century began, with Chateaubriand, in the poetry of religion. It ended, with Mallarmé and his disciples, in a ...”

“... in Iran in 1979. His cousin Masoud said the former chef loved his flat, with his hookah and silver samovar. Something happened to these people, a life, yes indeed, but also a death, a very public one, and to ignore it, or let it go in a cloud of unknowing, would fail to mark their attempts at survival. It is hard to think about, but these people all ...”