“... inscrutable for? In some sense, to live up to a code as unexplained and as inexplicable as that of Lord Jim. Much more frontal treatment is reserved for the Spanish Franciscan missionary, Father Velas-co. It is he who believes that he understands the situation: who wheels and deals with the Japanese, tries to outwit the Jesuits, seeks to persuade the hierarchy ...”

“... of Mont St Jean they left their carriage and took in the panorama. ‘In front of the right of Lord Wellington’s centre was the farm of Hougoumont … where poor Crawford [sic] was stationed.’ On the ground ‘hats, capes & the remains of every species of army accoutrement still remained on the field & heaps of slain lay buried … beneath a slight ...”

“... at his feet’. He’s Synge’s Playboy – and, appropriately, he once played the Playboy – lord of everywhere, or so it seems to him and those around him, who have nothing to measure him by. Like most of McGahern’s novels, That They May Face the Rising Sun drops you in the middle of someone else’s conversation, leaving you to find your own ...”

“... that, his fears dispelled, he now shares our rejoicing in eternal life, the gift of that Risen Lord who here on earth he did not yet know.That’s one way to do it. In a valedictory poem published in the LRB (6 February 1986), Clive James made a similar point, though less unctuously:A bedside manner in your graveyard toneSuggests that at the last we ...”

“... of appalling solitude trying unsuccessfully to make money out of growing sisal. When he returned home at the age of 28 his father purchased for him the local metal firm of Hoskins and Sons and he settled down to a life of conspicuous ordinariness as a medium-scale Birmingham businessman. He lived with his father and stepmother until the age of 42, when he ...”

“... and to concentrate on taking Mount Kent, the vital ground above Stanley. Other than politicking at home, what possible explanation can there be of this overriding of the local commander? During their discussion of Goose Green, Hastings and Jenkins make reference to one of the unsolved mysteries of the war. They say that Argentine defenders fought back fiercely ...”

“... because she was a replica of her ill-fated kin, a relic of the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad ...”

“... the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – Lord Sandwich, a former first lord of the Admiralty, was a friend, a fishing companion and Fenlands neighbour – and by spreading money about. Banks’s personal paid-for entourage for the voyage included the talented Swedish ...”

“... Cavendishes, who had no need to exploit the empire because they already owned massive estates at home. The Greys were a hardy Northumbrian family whose acreage was only a tenth of that owned by the local duke, a Tory, but they intended to be his political equals. They rose financially and socially through service to the army and the crown, at ...”

“... with all such mediation. He sent the Westmorland Gazette – a weekly Kendal paper founded by Lord Lowther in 1819 to propagandise against the Radicals – pages that were exactly ready for the press: the correct size, so no reduction or enlargement was needed; hand-drawn and hand-lettered in waterproof Indian ink, so no typesetter was needed; and of ...”

“... more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and consolation. Sidney and Greville had been born in ...”

“... magnificent stained glass windows glowing with harps, crowns and Union Jacks: mementos of the Home Rule that was delayed by the First World War, to be followed instead by the Rising, Partition, and all the capitalised Troubles that eventually brought us here. It looks like a C of E garrison church minus regimental flags, but only down to floor ...”

“... shown a collection of German watches and invited to take his pick. The war had hardly begun before home newspapers were offering £5 for exciting letters from the Front, so the men, tongue in cheek, sat down to oblige. ‘Since these adventures were untrue and of no value to the enemy, officers did not bother to censor them.’ The official battle reports ...”

“... Ceylon – ‘a land of blood and mange’ – was full of phenomena. Even persons still at home and with some claim to have escaped phenomenal status – Forster, for example, and Keynes – are given some severe treatment. It might be said that much of what Woolf wrote in those days was designed to impress Strachey. Possibly for that reason among ...”

“... engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until three o’clock in the morning in the empty marital home, ‘afraid; afraid of the future, afraid she was going mad, afraid of the wind rattling on the windows’. One’s first impression is that The Listeners is repellently written – or, to be fairer to the author, written in a deliberately trashy, novelettish ...”