“... I remember two furious old teachers driving me and my six-year-old girlfriend Heather Watt home early one morning. In recent weeks, we had been walking the mile to school in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when ...”

“... carriage horse. Forrest describes the affection felt by workers for their animals:‘He never came home from work until [his horse] Tabby was comfortable for the night,’ recalled the niece of one carter at the Coventry Station goods depot. Another man there would ‘bike out into the country, go down in the hedgerow, pull out my knife … And I’d cut a ...”

“... and the retrocession of the Transvaal. The Royal Commission preparing the climb-down met in the home of Haggard and his wife, to whom they paid a handsome rent. It was an exquisitely shaming episode, illustrating what would later be defined as the craven fear of being great. Kipling was too young to be contemplating a poem called ‘Retrocessional’. In ...”

“... a hiatus: he emerged from the jungle in 1914, after a year-long expedition, and promptly returned home to join the fight, it being ‘the patriotic desire of all able-bodied men to squash the Teuton’. He spent three years in the hell of the trenches, including the Somme, and was awarded the DSO for valour. In early 1919 he returned to the family ...”

“... types of creative imagination.The remarkable, and to many incomprehensible, success of The Lord of the Rings shows that Ker’s concepts are not entirely fossilised, even today. Gentrified and emasculated as it is by Edwardian, Wind in the Willows-type fantasy, the world of Tolkien’s narrative still has some genuine ingredients from Dark Age epic and ...”

“... tried on bardic robes. Ossian’s first major rivals, predictably enough, came from close to home. They were Robert Burns and William Shakespeare. It was partly in response to Ossianmania that Shakespeare came to be hailed as a bard (he had already come to be thought of as the national poet). The first American edition of Shakespeare, published in ...”

“... bill of rights, part of the original policy behind the 1996 consultation paper Bringing Rights Home, which introduced the Human Rights Act. Now that the rights included in the European Convention on Human Rights have been brought home, is it time to start a family of new rights, and possibly of duties, to go with ...”

“... or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except under compulsion, remains intolerable.’ Politically, Swinburne saw himself as an apostle of liberalism, supporting ...”

“... answer. Much better, a policeman explained to a note-maker, that a child fetches her father home from the pub for his dinner than her mother, who might stop to down a pint. In a street of housebreakers around Bethnal Green another bobby explained what a ‘fence’ for stolen goods was; Booth, clearly unfamiliar with Cockney rhyming slang, was puzzled ...”

“... in Nasser’s case they were willing to go so far as to attempt his assassination. At home, even Labour politicians were willing to see Communists as the principal enemy – hence the scandalous attempt by a committee of right-wing Labour MPs headed by George Brown to get MI5 to spy on their left-wing opponents within the Party in 1961, and ...”

“... Roosevelt riding at its head, followed by a man with a huge US flag. He and his son Kermit sent home, not a modest set of ‘specimens’, but 512 trophies, including nine white rhino (already rare), seven cheetahs, 17 lions and 11 elephants. Even in those days, this tally provoked international uproar. Less remarkable hunters were not exempted from heavy ...”

“... live on earth, to serve as the bondsman of another, of a man with no property, rather than be lord of all the dead who are no more.’ Casey’s book quotes some beautiful Greek and Roman epitaphs, most of them clinging to the fading present, or sceptical of the unrecorded future. This one is Greek: Do not pass by my epitaph, wayfarer, But ...”

“... him to various other forms of secrecy’. He was to become a government spy when Robert Harley was Lord High Treasurer (effectively Prime Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his personality, commenting ...”

“... to Irish nationalist analysis. Thus his new survey of Ireland over the longue durée stresses the home-grown varieties of hatred between various entities within the island and takes pleasure in presenting paradoxical interpretations. But the angle of vision is his own. Faced with the daunting prospect of covering Irish history from the late 18th to the early ...”

“... empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display. Asked by a colleague, on his return, how the visit had really gone, Carrington replied: ‘Oh, very well indeed. She liked the Reagan people very much. They’re so vulgar.’ The story illustrates the major ...”