“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... of a patent lawyer and ‘an accomplished Ottawa hostess’ with a house in Ottawa and a summer home next to that of Premier Mackenzie King. She graduated to the company of the rogues and rascals from a life typified by lunch with Mrs Barrington Ward, wife of the Times editor (Mrs Ward ‘in a dark reddish dress with fully pleated collar, looking what the ...”

“... known to most people only through this gloss. Born in 1874, the eighth child of Ned Baring, first Lord Revelstoke and head of the Baring Brothers bank, Maurice had an idyllic childhood, spent mainly at Membland, the family home in Dorset – a house with a larder big enough for 2000 head of game. After an equally idyllic ...”

“... he never claimed to resemble him, pointed out that Lampedusa’s Don Fabrizio is a great feudal lord whereas the Senyor is merely a poor Majorcan squire. Besides, while The Leopard records the disappearance of an entire society, Bearn only describes the disappearance of the Senyor. Yet though the scale is different, there are similarities in attitude and ...”

“... academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... of the scale and direction of any dynamic effects on British manufacturing industry of having a ‘home market’ with a population of 250 million. While no final conclusion can be reached yet, there is no doubt at all that Lord Kaldor, who always maintained these effects would be adverse, has the best of the argument at ...”

“... miniature. Bread comes to feature in these pages like a household ghost: stale for Tommy Morgan; home-made (by her father) for the dressmaker’s daughter; for the stockbroker’s son, resented buttered slices to be fought through before getting to the cake. The kitchen boy’s memory of the farmer’s daughter’s rebuke to her maid – ‘Never, never give ...”

“... old toy rifle. Amanda had flown with Abhay to Bombay, but couldn’t take India and went straight home again. Her rejection of the country can be seen as a starting-point for the whole train of events; except that there are any number of other starting points to choose from. In any case it’s not a train of events so much as a tangle – like the Gordian ...”

“... they scoffed, rolling their eyes at me. Just like her dad, like George Harrison. My Sweet Lord.’ The girls cling on desperately to bits of culture, fashion, pop, but they have the sense that it’s all passing them by, like life itself. Humiliation and conventionality and passivity and banality are inculcated into Jane, even by something as trivial ...”

“... when the NHS speech therapist to whom I had been referred told me she was returning to the family home in Greece where she and her father, a retired sea captain, keep bees. But, on reflection, there seemed no reason not to continue our weekly half-hour sessions using Zoom or Skype, and it has been working out well. If I describe it here, it’s not to support ...”

“... du Roi. A year earlier, French armies had torched the town of Lunéville and with it La Tour’s home and an unknown quantity of his work: but his allegiance remained evidently to the force that was extirpating Lorraine’s sovereignty. The little else that we know of the public man is not appealing. A 1646 deposition from Lunévillians, complaining of an ...”

“... in 1973, and Iraq to invade Iran in 1980, and sold arms on the quiet to both sides throughout. As Lord Copper once put it, ‘the Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere. Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.’ Considerations of this kind tend to be forgotten once war begins, but one ...”

“... in showing that this was certainly not always true. She begins her book with Edward Barlow leaving home in Lancashire in 1657 to go and be a sailor, and years later drawing a picture of the parting in his diary, with his mother beckoning to him to stay. So much for Stone. But if parental emotions are still allowed, or not altogether disproved, do the ...”

“... out to explain why Keynes out of any number of ‘solutions’ should finally have lighted upon ‘home development’ (state-financed capital development), how an apparent ‘gap’ between savings and investment could satisfactorily be explained, and how wage-stickiness, which had originally been seen as a kind of social maladjustment, became in The General ...”

“... that Golding had won the Nobel Prize Faber arranged for me to meet him and Mrs Golding at their home in Wiltshire. I took to them both and agreed to help. Faber nervously brought up the ‘question of, uh, recompense’, but I, foolish Egyptian, waved it aside: it was a gift.I spoke to my brother, about whom a couple of words are now necessary. Ala is an ...”