“... family hark back to Cherokee Indians. Andrew Presley, a Scottish blacksmith, emigrated to North Carolina in the middle of the 18th century. His son fought in the Wars of Independence and finally settled in the district of Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aaron was born 150 years later. Elvis and Gladys promises much it cannot deliver, nestling ...”

“... her childhood in Sylhet, Bangladesh, a retired schoolteacher, still lives with her older sister in North Calcutta in a small rented flat. My father’s ancestral house languishes in Bangladesh and is at last, we hear, to be torn down; but he has been luckier than most other ‘refugees’ – he rose to a high position in the company he worked for, and bought ...”

“... Watier’s, ‘stank’, he said, ‘of horse-dung and bad blacking’. Asked about a tour to the North, he enquired of his valet: ‘Which of the lakes do I admire?’ ‘Windermere, sir.’ ‘Ah yes – Windermere, so it is – Windermere.’ He was obsessed with cleanliness, spending two hours every morning on his ablutions, brushing his flesh with a ...”

“... to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. But ‘berserkers’ did not appear till 1822, though by 1879 Edmund Gosse could call someone ‘a dangerous old literary bersark to the ...”

“... afford to move to the house where they lived for the rest of their lives, in idyllic La Jolla just north of San Diego. Marlowe remained in LA. The author who once said he ‘lived on the edge of nothing’ gave that existence to his protagonist, in whom were combined the drinker of Chandler’s successful, social Twenties and the itinerant, lonely, anonymous ...”

“... of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ...”

“... which eclipses all the paintings he has seen. On paying a visit to Monet’s water lilies at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, he has a ‘terrible urge to walk out’. He couldn’t stand Cézanne. In Vallotton’s work at the 1904 Salon d’Automne he finds ‘the petty dreariness of an upholsterer’. Although Vallotton, like Lautrec and ...”

“... between $3000 and $5000 to a smuggler known as a coyote who guides the children on their journey north. The child travels from his or her home country to Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, then boards the northbound freight trains known as a single entity: La Bestia, ‘the beast’. The children face the physical dangers of sneaking on to moving ...”

“... history at $3.7 billion overall. More than a hundred million dollars was spent on the 2014 North Carolina Senate race alone. And as the amount of money required to win an election increases, politicians are forced to spend more time raising it – by most estimates from a third to half of their working hours. Once that would have seemed incredible, but ...”

“... colleague Mervyn Storey complained that the signs at the most popular tourist attraction in his North Antrim constituency, the Giant’s Causeway, misinformed the public by telling them that the rock formation was 550 million years old. Despite such stories it would be a great mistake to pigeonhole Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist ...”

“... followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to arrive at Harwich. I had never met anyone who had walked all the way from central London to the countryside – indeed, apart from my ten-year-old son, of whom more ...”

“... once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that ...”

“... most notorious character) carries on two affairs, one with a girl, Lauren, the other with a boy, Paul. He obsesses over the former but never acknowledges the latter – even though we get the affair in lavish detail from Paul’s point of view. When you read it now, you see Ellis beginning to experiment with the narrative ...”

“... denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... in some way, as both have teaching jobs at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, just north of LA. So they meet, they fall in love, they move in together – and immediately, their hilltop love nest has to double as a family home, ‘abundant and containing’, for Harry’s three-year-old son. A couple of years later and they are joined by ...”