“... earlier the pulling down of a mosque, said to have been built on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram, had led to the worst communal violence in India since Partition. The facts, as so often, are disputed, but it seems that a large crowd threw stones at the train, four carriages were set on fire, and 59 people, 12 of them children, burned to death. Over ...”

“... which she refuses to do, and now she refuses to go on with the marriage.) It’s Tommy she goes home with, but it was Jim who catalysed her feelings. Already in the earlier timeframe a woman had seemed to function as a symbolising link between the two men, when Tommy’s sister Siri went out for a while with Jim. She also brought a winning floaty lyricism ...”

“... after day he waited with all the other animals and dolls for somebody to come along and take him home.’ No one seems interested, until ‘one morning a little girl stopped and looked straight into Corduroy’s bright eyes.’ ‘Look!’ Lisa says. ‘There’s the very bear I’ve always wanted.’ But her mother replies ‘not today, dear,’ and points ...”

“... not normally present in industrial disputes. There is the daily violence – brought into every home by television – on the picket-lines, where hordes of tough young miners and uniformed policemen sway and grapple in physical combat like Medieval armies. There is the uneasiness about the accountability of the Police. There are the guerrilla raids at ...”

“... to need a maid just at the moment when Blume turns up, Tsirl offers Blume the job in return for a home. When her son Hirshl falls in love with the new cousin-cum-servant, she steers him skilfully in the direction of Mina Ziemlich, a ‘modern girl’, and more importantly a rich one. Hirshl scarcely has time to draw breath before he finds himself married to ...”

“... vanities of this world and enjoy in the grave profound repose. Take my tears to the throne of the Lord.’ Her body had the seeds of mortality in it, blossoming like diseased flowers. ‘Grandmother, what is this place?’ the child asked. The matriarch’s voice was calm. It was almost a whisper on the breath, like a green kawakawa leaf suspended in the ...”

“... was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in August 1900, the youngest daughter and ninth of ten children of Lord and Lady Glamis. When she was four her father inherited the earldom of Strathmore and she became Lady Elizabeth. The Strathmores had houses in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II ...”

“... at least, who aren’t trying to enter the US illegally – are packing their bags and going home. In the southern and south-eastern parts of the city, you can see it with your own eyes. Beyond the first cotton fields, the American Wall bars the horizon, a reminder that something does lie beyond all this misery, but something inaccessible. You leave the ...”

“... about her. She was American but had lived in Germany for years, though not in Berlin, the usual home of American artists in exile. Her novel had an opening sentence that would make an MFA instructor proud, even as it seemed to parody MFA style: ‘I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.’ The miscarriage ...”

“... Through​ a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political consequences of the result – the tenor of a Theresa May government, the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn – and lawyers have been called on to consider the status of the referendum vote and the technicalities involved in triggering Article 50 ...”

“... The James painting was worked on over the summers of 1910 and 1911, at Hill House, the Epping home of the hostess and patron Mary Hunter. She was the wife of a coal baron and said it was her ‘sacred duty’ to spend all her husband’s money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent ...”

“... writes in Laughing Torso. ‘She was very beautiful and had a wonderful deep voice. I used to go home and attempt to lower my voice too. I think I succeeded to a certain extent after some practice.’ Bell’s impression of Hamnett was less favourable. In a letter to her husband, she describes a morning spent listening to Hamnett’s ‘appallingly sordid ...”

“... keels of the world’s liners and battleships. Ettore had perfect German and reasonable French; at home he and his family spoke Triestine dialect, while his ambition had always been to live in Florence and become a native speaker of lingua Toscana, the true Italian. His command of English was not good, although he and his wife visited London two or three times ...”

“... It took nerve and courage and immense self-confidence (Breen likens it to virtu) to become ‘a lord of the soil’ – that is to say, to get a good price and, equally important, to be respected for the quality of his leaf. Good management signified ‘private virtue’: to criticise a planter’s tobacco was almost tantamount to impugning his ...”

“... itself to total surrender in Ireland is captured in this book. The much-abused reactionary Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks, whom no one ever accused of a lack of patriotism, is quoted as saying in 1925 that ‘Englishmen including himself were tired of paying money to Irishmen.’ Austen Chamberlain, more explicitly, denounced Northern Ireland as ...”