“... The late James Cameron always liked to claim that the only male company in which he felt at home was that of his fellow journalists. They offered him, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the conversational shorthand of completely common understanding’. Nor was his in any way an exceptional reaction. The existence across the world of various favoured journalistic watering-holes – sometimes grandly known as Press Clubs, more usually simply hotel bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that ...”

“... covering the Lake Poets, the Inklings and scores of other writers who composed as they walked. (Lord of the Rings in particular reads like an overly grandiose guide to fell-walking in Middle Earth.) But I am sure the relationships between skating and literary style have not yet been the subject of serious study. As I skate, I keep an eye out for the Parks ...”

“... The place I’ve called home for the past year or so is a motel just off Route 1 as it heads down the Pacific coast from Santa Cruz to Watsonville. Late on the night of the earthquake a friend called me from where she lived near Carmel, an hour’s drive south, to tell me what had happened. It was early the next day with me, since I was in southern Ireland, having just buried my mother ...”

“... one occasion when I have broken out in a cold sweat of anxiety. It was on a Saturday morning, at home, when I was shaving and listening to the 7 a.m. BBC Radio News. Headline Number One: a senior civil servant had been taken into custody for an alleged breach of the Official Secrets Act. For many months, since July 1982, I had been campaigning by ...”

“... an episodic history (one reason for his subtitle: you don’t expect narrative continuity in home movies) and he has done so without serious modification of his normal conceited manner. The history is primarily that of two related families, Raines and Pasternaks (a second reason for calling the book a home movie). I ...”

“... seen material relating to the founder’s early years. Not, indeed, as much as one would wish: his home life and schooldays are still virtually a blank and we do not even know exactly where he was born. But from 1772, when he was 19, drawings and documents begin to accumulate and continue to do so to the extent that no other Georgian architect’s early life ...”

“... railways, Russian industry, Malaysian rubber and, more prosaically, municipal gas and water at home. There was a great deal here to whet the appetite of the Forsyte class. And the banks which held the rest of that class’s savings sought a decent return on their deposits, too. Moreover, they were well placed to play a large part in City life after the ...”

“... new word in the vocabulary) and envy by the housewife in the shop queue of those ladies who sat at home while the chauffeur stocked up on food for hoarding. However, most of the class feeling tended to arise in the ‘wage-labour market’. Total mobilisation of the factories served to wipe out the bitter poverty in which all too many families began the ...”

“... and potentially lightweight 39. Superficially, this might seem an ill-considered gamble; but Lord Salisbury was not a man to play so recklessly with the jewel in the Imperial Crown. Curzon was an outstanding Viceroy, just as he was later (1919-23) to be the best-informed Foreign Secretary in a long time, where Eastern affairs were concerned. The ...”

“... in artists as he was in art, and met many examples of the species in Soho clubs. Being at home with painters and intellectuals considerably his seniors seems to have come naturally to him, and soon we find him in Paris on familiar terms with Michel and Louise Leiris, Jacques Lacan, Sylvia Bataille, André Masson and Alberto Giacometti, the last of ...”

“... mag. One man decided to christen my Dad Mar Rupertus – ‘Mar’, he said, was Persian for Lord. (He called his cat Mar Pluto too.) I always liked my father’s weird parcels – strange stamps and seals and semi-papal bulls, the family trees of those descended from Avignon popes (all covered in gold leaf), an altar-cloth depicting all Christ’s ...”

“... calling it ‘completely offensive’ and contrary to common sense; an attack taken up by the home secretary (who thought it appropriate to question the sanity of the decision), but sharply criticised in the Times by the crossbench lawyer-peer Lord Pannick. The naming of Goodwin and Giggs is on a different plane from ...”

“... of Valencia since the early 1460s. The city was the largest port in the western Mediterranean and home to many foreign merchants and artists. Saint Michael was the central panel of a large altarpiece commissioned by Antoni Joan, lord of Tous (50 km from Valencia), and it is him we see praying for forgiveness in the ...”

“... À Rebours (1884), nor an anguished anticipation of modernity like Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902) or Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) or Gottfried Benn’s Brains (1916), but really stuck – and stuck in every sense – in the middle. The gist of it was written down when Valéry was 21, maybe a jeune parque, but ...”

“... and Churchill liked one another and worked together perfectly, with Attlee taking charge of the home front. As Jago points out, he managed the difficult job of being loyal both to Churchill and to the Labour Party by being absolutely straight with both, saying that complete unity was necessary while the war lasted but that even in the course of the war ...”