“... in Valhöll (‘the halls of the slain’), where the entertainment wouldn’t be praising the Lord, but fighting and feasting, and where the undead heroes would be raised to life every evening to fight again the next day. Nor would this be eternal life: gods, heroes and Valhöll itself would be extinguished in the fires of Ragnarök. As the Old Norse poem ...”

“... drama, The Massacre at Paris. Religion loomed large in Canterbury. The only book in the family home – at least by the time of John Marlowe’s death in 1605 – was the Bible. In St George’s parish, lying between the cathedral and the city’s eastern gate, Marlowe grew up literally in the shadow of the Church. He witnessed its finest pomps, also no ...”

“... Function (Stansted Airport) or the need for exceptional lightness and openness (the new stand at Lord’s cricket ground) or the nature of the business (the ITN building) have all been reasons to turn to it. Styles which advertised probity with bronze and granite were becoming popular when, with a great piece of salesmanship, Richard Rogers persuaded ...”

“... says, ‘in the air of this country, I mean, which makes these old Franco guys feel very much at home. Free to do what they feel like ... ’ They are not all old, either. Baltasar has seen their young supporters training in helmets and flak-jackets, with plenty of money behind them. His dreams and visions get worse, and so does the news, making his terror ...”

“... minutes’ – which means that Bozzy picked up a prostitute in the few yards which separated his home on the Lawn-market from the law courts in Parliament House. He began to drink again, sometimes throwing things about the house when he returned; he tried to control himself (never more than six glasses of wine at a time, he promised his friend Temple), but ...”

“... of war: in fact, the nearest I have come to war was in 1940, when I and other members of the Home Guard patrolled round Oxford gas works. We foresaw with a flash of strategical penetration that the entire German parachute force would land on Oxford, if only because Oxford was supposed to be in those days a seat of learning. Why it should concentrate on ...”

“... English knight from St Albans, claimed to have travelled the world for 34 years before returning home in 1358 to compose his Book. The work survives in some three hundred manuscripts in ten languages, followed by a robust print life. It was known to Columbus, Leonardo and John Dee, influenced cartographers, and inspired London stage plays. Yet no one knows ...”

“... era; the best work naturalises what’s alien in other times and places, makes its readers feel at home. If you want to experience the otherness of the Victorians, don’t read George Eliot, read Charlotte Yonge. Stafford makes me taste the alienation and disenchantment of the mid-century zeitgeist as – for example – her contemporary Eudora Welty ...”

“... 1921 because of the social differentiation between Ulster and the Southern Unionists (who, under Lord Midleton, made their reluctant peace with the Republic). The tragedy for many Ulster Unionists was that, even by the mid-19th century, England was already outgrowing the political economy on which Pitt’s Union had been based. Ireland received the same ...”

“... of drama in the story of how the news of her father’s death came to her in Kenya and she came home as Queen. She entered upon her new duties as one would have expected. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m strong as a horse,’ she said in reply to those who worried that she might be asked to do too much at the Coronation, and: ‘Did my father do it? Then I ...”

“... an Englishman, the normal pattern would be to spend some years, after an elementary education at home, in the great schools there, then to return home to find employment and, as soon as possible, a benefice, then to go back for a further period of study at Paris or perhaps Bologna, after which he would be fit for the ...”

“... born-again Christian from the charismatic Episcopal Church of the Apostles who believed that the Lord had healed his wounds and who – in the words of one former associate at the National Security Council – ‘thought he was doing God’s work at the NSC.’ There was Oliver North the Man of Action, able to work 25 hours in every 24, dubbed ...”

“... Priest: With sorrow for misusing and abusing the beauty and resources of the earth, we pray to the Lord. All: Lord have mercy. From the Litany of Contrition at a Catholic church in Sussex, December 1996 To build a roadway or a pavement or a house or a skyscraper you have to scrape away topsoil. This stuff is alive. Just ...”

“... therefore, she subsequently improved it. On his way to the wedding, George told his friend Lord Moira that he would ‘never love any woman but Fitzherbert’. Caroline had thus to contend with a wife, or former wife, and a reigning mistress. She never had a chance of winning. George was drunk at the wedding ceremony, and drunk and probably impotent ...”

“... you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you see a garden which has nothing in it but an abandoned car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books. Gardening as an activity, however, is rather more complex than the gardens ...”