“... of E.M. Forster’s Mrs Moore. She is a perfectly willing traveller, although she prefers being at home, and looks forward to getting back there. But her passage to India destroys the point of her life. In a sense it works too well – the Marabar caves, those well-known tourist attractions, are for her a real if ironic revelation – but in another sense the ...”

“... he married. Myrtle Jones was born into a farming family in Tasmania in 1893. In 1916, she left home to go on the stage, though neither as ‘Sandra Lindsay’ nor under her own name did she leave any trace in Australia’s theatrical history. In 1923, she married a British-born Gilbert and Sullivan trouper, Roy Workman, and late in 1926 they set out for ...”

“... epitomises like no other the tension between ‘national’ and ‘economic’ principles. Home historically to Uzbek-speaking traders and agriculturalists, the city was surrounded by the winter and summer encampments of Kyrgyz herders, with whose economy the city was deeply interlinked. After considerable deliberation among local Bolsheviks in the ...”

“... be. Not near! not near!’) When his mother is hospitalised after an overdose, Demon is sent to a home for boys run by the fearsome Crickson, familiarly called ‘Creaky’ – the descendant of Mr Creakle, headmaster of Salem House in David Copperfield. There he meets a fellow inmate of whom even Creaky is in awe, the Steerforth character, whose real name is ...”

“... 2042, produced during the First World War.A. 2042 was designed to be sent to family or friends at home by those on active service. It began by warning that ‘nothing is to be written on this side’ other than the sender’s signature and the date, and ‘if anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.’ It then offered a series of phrases, each ...”

“... Board instead, cutting his junior’s salary for good measure. When Gladstone introduced his Irish Home Rule scheme. Chamberlain saw it as a personal challenge, which in part it was. Angry at his treatment, and convincing himself that Home Rule would not appeal to the new electors, he impulsively resigned from the ...”

“... powers of the House of Lords. Between 1912 and 1914 Ulster Unionists and their fellow diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support ...”

“... of Daily Express readers thought that the paper was pro-Labour – and that at the height of Lord Bea-verbrook’s career. The fact is that newspapers can influence opinion only when it is already flowing in a certain direction, or, perhaps, on issues remote from the reading public’s own experience: they cannot alter strongly-held opinions formed in ...”

“... entry for 5 January 1666 – first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by coach with four horses to London, to my Lord’s house in Covent-Guarden. But, Lord! what staring to see a nobleman’s coach come to town. And porters every ...”

“... ancient literature as much as in a Buckinghamshire graveyard. Even the ploughman plodding wearily home is a personage from classical poetry rather than 18th-century agriculture. Gray’s friend Thomas Wharton noted: ‘In England the ploughman always quits his work at noon. Gray, therefore, with Milton, painted from books and not from life.’ He did not seem ...”

“... fact that he has never had a job, never wanted to ‘settle’ until late in life, never felt at home in his own perfectly respectable middle-class family and home. These are the themes of this autobiography. I didn’t really know Logue when I asked him to that lunch, didn’t realise how strongly he must have felt, as he ...”

“... on forbidden infidel activities, providing no Saudis are ‘corrupted’. Europeans may brew their home-made hooch, and discreetly indulge in extra-marital sex, so long as they remain in their hotel rooms or compounds, though technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering the Hejaz in ...”

“... book just how often he is talking to his supporters on the phone – presumably from his Berkshire home or from the Commons. Although even now he doesn’t appear to notice the fact, the diary records one of Kilroy’s major tactical errors. Late in his account he boasts of agreeing to have a TV film made about his reselection battle. The film left it unclear ...”

“... to their ghetto, made up mainly of diplomats, which gave them access to the essentials from back home – breakfast cereals and Coca Cola among them. I remember the wife of the correspondent of a well-known news magazine who had brought with her a three-month supply of toilet paper because she had been told it was not available in India. The ignorance does ...”

“... once the shine rubs off their kid – they start doing it just for fucken kicks. Vernon’s home-town, Martirio, is a biliously ignorant place, populated by obese women, coarse cowboys, leather-lunged pastors with strapping voices, slow-witted deputies, and the like. Its chief attraction seems to be the local restaurant, the Bar-B-Chew Barn, a name ...”