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“... but that elder branch of the family luckily died out in 1879, bringing a further injection of upward social mobility and broad acres to a dynasty which had begun with a penniless clerk in India in 1830. By 1900 G.M. Trevelyan saw his family almost as haughty Border Lords: ‘It is a rule that no Trevelyan ever sucks up either to the press, or the ...”

“... Hence the careers of Desmond Tutu and Alan Boesak, the latest and best exponents of this crab-like upward leverage into power-broker status. The Western liberal dream was that black South Africans could somehow be gently led to liberation by living saints – Christian Gandhis – who would blessedly leave Western investments and strategic interests undamaged ...”

“... flight of the mind takes him to famous poems like Paradise Lost, once famous poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45), and less familiar works such as Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). He ends with a chapter on Baroque painted ceilings.Celestial ascent at death is an ancient idea. In its earliest known ...”

“... dead mother, upon whose flesh they had fed twenty days past, and having eaten all from the feete upward to the bare bones, rosting it continually by a slow fire, were now come to the eating of her said entralls in like sort roasted, yet not divided from the body, being as yet raw. Moryson’s rhetoric ensures that the grisly detail of the scene overwhelms ...”

“... man not only receives the light of divine life, but gives it also; he not only makes his way upward to God but he even fashions gods.’ ‘Do you mean statues, Trismegistus?’ asks the doctor timidly, and is rebuked: these statues really do make prophecies and heal or inflict diseases. Then there is a long denunciation of Christians, who despise the ...”

“... tiny, cramped writing, running over at the end of each letter and seeking out the narrow margin upward, over the top, down the other side. That there had ever been any love or tenderness between my parents was, until this point, a carefully withheld secret. It was, to me, an unimaginable hinterland to the storms of furious shouting, slamming doors, frozen ...”

“... a delicate woman: small and gamine in appearance, even in her starched VAD uniform. (Her brother Edward, who won a Military Cross on the first day of the Somme and died in June 1918, a few days after my uncle Newton, towers over her by at least a foot in family photographs.) And in many ways she was delicate in spirit too. Insanity ran in the family – she ...”

“... likely to cave in, and not to walk towards the cluster of buildings a mile to the right, on King Edward Point, which was the British Garrison and a military secret. How many soldiers were stationed there? This was a military secret, too. ‘Very hush-hush,’ said the ruddy-faced curator solemnly.As far as I could see South Georgia is further away from ...”