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“... are ‘everything is forgotten or invalidated’ and ‘everything is as slippery as compacted snow.’ Both recur in the book’s coda, which summons the figure of Marta’s young and now half-orphaned son to dilate on the theme of comprehensive oblivion: That boy will never know what happened, his father and his aunt will hide it from him, I will ...”

“... as if expectantly … miming their perished fruitfulness. Every winter the orchard is flooded with snow, and every spring the waters are parted, death is undone, and every Lazarus rises, except these two.’ Later, when Ruth is on a boat with her aunt, she witnesses the dawn. Writers should always be careful with the dawn – it’s tempting to be overblown ...”

“... privileged background is mined differently in the impressive prose poem about his mother, ‘Margaret Vyner’, where names of perfumes mix with family names and those of the great and good to produce a sense of miraculously lingering evanescence while the poem’s chronicle-like structure takes us through mostly happy returns. What is striking is that ...”

“... their London office into a Canadian log cabin, with bearskins nailed to the wall and imitation snow.) After the early Twenties the two women were never apart for more than a day or two. Caroline was the secretary and willing partner. Joan Givner has subtitled her biography The Hidden Life. Mazo, however, at the age of 78, published an autobiography of ...”

“... partner and natural outlet – she had recorded the moment when, after clearing a path through the snow to ‘the necessary’ outside Dove Cottage, he had proudly summoned her to view it, and been promptly drenched by a fresh fall from the roof. And yet she had also faithfully followed her brother’s road to social respectability, brought about as much as ...”

“... riches, for the companies and shareholders who monopolise our water supply today. In England, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished state-owned regional water authorities in 1989, and water was privatised. Eleven of England’s 18 water utilities are at least partly owned by foreign entities, including the giant conglomerate Macquarie (Thames ...”

“... Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around ...”

“... welfare cheque spells doom For any spark of spiritual agility. She sounds, in other words, like Margaret Thatcher – Though words are just where Thatcher couldn’t match her. It’s easy for the Yanks to preach self-help: There’s so much protein they can help themselves. In Britain we’d be feeding children kelp And watching them grow up the size of ...”

“... his father’s throne, who, like an evil queen in a fairy tale demanding strawberries be picked in snow, counts on his rival dying in the attempt. Jason builds the Argo, gathers together a band of heroes and sets out for the Black Sea. Medea differs from other tragic heroes and heroines, from Oedipus or Antigone or Hecuba or Jason himself, in that she is the ...”

“... and the electric motor, those icons of modernity. His reputation survived more than a decade as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite scientist: between 1982 and 1996 Matthew Noble’s bust occupied a place of honour in the entrance hall at Number Ten. His stock has risen slowly and steadily; compare this with the Nasdaq-esque slumps and booms of Darwin’s ...”

“... so close it seemed they were right there with us, in the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister, Margaret. Just beyond that stand of trees was Kirk’s chicken farm, where the birds ran free in wide pens and Mr Kirk, who lived in an old stone house that I took for a mansion, walked back and forth all day, distributing the feed, collecting the eggs and ...”

“... the remainder of his life. He was to establish a second household with children in the 1930s with Margaret Gardiner and a third with Margot Heinemann in the 1950s, both of whom also survived him. Though the originality of his mind was astonishing, his progress as a scientist was curiously uneven. Forced to shift from mathematics to physics, he failed to get a ...”

“... the war, Ballard took a boat to Southampton with his mother and younger sister. In 1947, Edna and Margaret rejoined Ballard’s father in Shanghai, while he remained in England, boarding at The Leys School in Cambridge and spending the holidays with his maternal grandparents in West Bromwich. He hated it. ‘England seemed derelict, dark and half-ruined ...”

“... by 8.45 and a pizza (gluten-free) supper.13 January. We abandon any plans of going to Yorkshire as snow is forecast, some of our indecision to be put down to the over-dramatisation of the weather by the forecasters who, one feels, long to be part of the news not just the background to it. On the News reports of Tony Snowdon’s death. I first met him in 1968 ...”

“... painted either. He acquired a temporary patron in the form of a rich American widow called Margaret de Silver. He had book plans, rather English subjects, all: one on Dickens, one on music hall, one on prisons, but he was never that sort of jobbing writer. He lived for six months in 1928 in a shepherd’s cottage in Northumberland. He visited ...”