“... case pieces of raw experience, ‘hastily gobbled up’ on the journey and now ‘digested’ back home and ‘dispersed’ to his readers. The metaphor inescapably suggests the travel book as a kind of post-prandial fart. The title page is adorned with engravings depicting noteworthy comic events during the journey – his seasickness on the crossing to ...”

“... culture’s mantle of top poet, a position Lowell had held unchallenged since the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle and his subsequent Pulitzer in 1947. Hayden Carruth, born in 1921, who edited probably the finest – and certainly the most inclusive – anthology of modern American poetry in the last century, The Voice That Is Great within Us, wrote in ...”

“... Banal panel discussions remind us of what Jinnah said or didn’t say. The perfidious Lord Mountbatten and his ‘promiscuous’ wife, Edwina, are denounced for favouring India when it came to the division of the spoils. It’s true, but we can’t blame them for the wreck Pakistan has become. In private, of course, there is much ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... called by far-right groups to take place and told the local Asian community to stay at home. In August 2015 Mushin Ahmed, an 81-year-old imam, was viciously attacked by racists; one kick left the imprint of the sole of a trainer on his face. A few weeks after his death yet another racist demonstration was called. The police allowed the march to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Britons on the home front in the Second World War bore the sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing, which were intended to constrain the demand for precious consumables, ensure their quality and allow them to be shared out equally ...”

“... they are well discussed in the catalogue by Ariane Banks in her chapter on ‘Carrington at Home’ and the design of the show recreates some of the trompe l’oeil effects at which Carrington excelled. There is an illusionary bookcase made for Lytton, its titles cut and pasted from other volumes to create such suggestive chimeras as ‘...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”