“... fortune rather than following his father and grandfather into farming near Swindon. He made his mark, and initiated the Thatcher family business by producing an arsenic-based sheep dip for the Wanganui farmers which turned out to be a very useful wood and leather preservative as well. More interesting, according to his great-granddaughter, Thomas ...”

“... across Whitehall from my office in the Ministry of Defence to see the Home Secretary. Roy Jenkins rose from his chair and said: ‘Well, it’s all over, Callaghan is appointing Crosland.’ He nodded to a handwritten envelope addressed to the President of the French Republic. I knew that it contained a letter declaring his willingness to become President of ...”

“... It’s not just solidarity that pushes them together. To be single, living alone, is a mark of nonconformity, and therefore an ‘illness’ and a source of ‘contagion’. Feeling is illicit too. You’re allowed to express pain only if you injure yourself – and for a strictly limited period. The gravest crime is to mourn the dead. Those who do ...”

“... their beauty are –      Oh, no man knowsThrough what wild centuries      Roves back the rose.De la Mare tried out ‘roams’, ‘roots’ and ‘climbs’ before settling on ‘roves’ in the final line; and the word effectively twins his own roving back through Tennyson and centuries of lyric nature poetry to ‘the wild ...”

“... as a skinned rabbit’s head, the next she is overwhelmed by an all-consuming radiance: She rose to meet and savour it, gliding through rings of splintery light, up, up. Where was she going? Higher, she found or mentally assembled webs of incandescence out of which the flakes came sprinkling. She guessed, she knew what they were: stars. The teetering ...”

“... exterminate all Armenian males of 12 years and over’. On 20 April, the Armenians of Van rose in self-defence, and held on till a Russian advance reached them in May. Four days later, as British forces were about to land at Gallipoli, Armenian deputies and former ministers were arrested. In Anatolia, the killings and deportations spread, supposedly ...”

“... jacket. I inspected his ears (clean, shell-like), his fingernails (dirty, bitten), the faint tide-mark of grime on his neck, the ingrained oil on his mechanic’s hands, inhaled the faint aroma of marijuana on his breath.’ Atkinson’s novels tend to concern family networks held together by women, with the men participating more or less reluctantly. There ...”

“... several Orientals, people who could have been Mexicans. The drums were struck, a small chant rose to the sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or cultivated ...”

“... deep-rising sobs. My turn. My turn. My turn to cry. And I think my tears will never stop.’ I rose and flew to him, all but carried him to the armchair... Above us was a kitchen ceiling-rack on which May-the-maid had hung socks to dry ... With the damp woollen things I wiped his face – cheeks, eyes, matted hair – again and again; and then my own; our ...”

“... bathroom I have ever lived with. Changes to the interior usually took place without leaving any mark on the front façade; indeed it would seem that an attempt to date any townhouse built between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s using only the architecture of the back view as evidence offers the untrained eye little to go on. The surviving buildings of that ...”

“... of rapes recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on which their attention was focused, rose in the following year and hasn’t significantly decreased since. It is just one facet of this ugly reality – one more thing to contend with – that while attention to violence against women may be sparked by anger and a desire for redress, it might also ...”

“... than 8 per cent. Over the year, the figure for books written by women reviewed in the Irish Times rose to 29 per cent. Beside it on the newsstand, the Irish Independent had higher figures without much fuss: 37 per cent of reviewed books were by women. In October 2013, the Independent even had an unheralded, possibly accidental, all-female review section. The ...”

“... did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a glorious perfection of freedom, as Twain saw things: no mother or aunts to ...”

“... patron, who became home secretary after his death. The tensions and paradoxes of patronage culture mark Jones’s entire career, nowhere more than in his dealings with Althorp and the Spencer family. The grandson of an Anglesey sheep farmer, Jones was never exactly poor: his father was a real self-made man, a brilliant mathematician who ...”

“... This was widely understood to be a solemn and significant national event, but when Howard rose to speak, he wagged a finger at the audience and hectored them on the virtues of his amendments to the Native Title Act. A number of black Australians rose and turned their backs. Meanwhile, the long-running enquiry into ...”