“... including the hoarding and preserving of unusual, irreplaceable or tasteful possessions. It may also be that, far from denying inherited traits, Nigel Nicolson and other labourers in the heritage industry are acting in tradition, both in flaunting their ancestors’ rare acquisitions for public stupefaction and edification, and in relying on the middle ...”

“... its collar. She recognised her collar, but never made it the object of sweet dreams. Dog-like she may have been in her devotion to her husband, Sergei Efron, but the only thing that ever truly concerned her was, as she herself wrote, to make human speech convey the inarticulate noises of instinctive emotion. The phatic protolanguage of the groan and the ...”

“... as an example of his wit) that three mistakes in his life is not bad going. My fellow smoker, who may be reaching some kind of limit, asks if he supports these children. ‘He sends them a bag of mealie meal from time to time,’ chortles the Evil One. I loathe this woman so much (Yea, yea, moral philosophy and freedom of speech) I decide to kill her. A plan ...”

“... the Eaglescliffe Hall now is, God alone knows. I couldn’t trace it in Lloyd’s Register, but it may have been renamed. At best, ships live half as long as humans, and it would now be 38 years old. I was at its launch in October 1956: the photo shows me in school cap and muffler, with Great-Uncle Alex and Great-Aunt Jean, Cousin Jean, two small Canadian ...”

“... embrace the idea perhaps most difficult for defenders of traditional history to accept: that there may be more than one legitimate account of past events, a ‘multiplicity of accurate histories’. Despite these concessions, however, and like the traditionalists they frequently criticise, they ultimately rally to defend the intellectual integrity of the study ...”

“... for it is the greatest preserver and promoter of industry, trade, arms and study.’ However that may be, strict settlements did not come under the common law courts but the court of Chancery, which did not encourage alienation. Nevertheless, Chancery promulgated and enforced ‘the rule against perpetuities’, which laid down that no estate could be tied up ...”

“... in a ceremony that involves being held down and grotesquely smeared with watermelon juice. She may even be Jack’s cousin. But the spectre of incest is already effaced by the angelic evidence of the couple’s child. Gloria’s alternative fate is held up for pity in the figure of her estranged mentor, Julia Mortimer, the schoolteacher bitterly dying ...”

“... observatory) would be ‘sufficiently capacious to receive five millions of the dead, where they may repose in perfect security’. The scheme foundered, but if anyone feels like reviving it, I’d be happy to make a contribution in return for a guaranteed place somewhere near the pinnacle. Failing that, I thought I would after all settle for the shared ...”

“... the forces of social oppression, and even Vera herself, billowy, accepting earth mother though she may be, is exasperatingly ungraspable, a figure caught only momentarily, as if in the headlights of a passing car. The kind of ellipsis Murphy allows for here fares better on the stage, where intangibles – the movements of bodies; the nuances of speech – fill ...”

“... hearts would be broken, but then they are broken anyway. It is hard not to sympathise with what may seem at first an outré suggestion; there is certainly something odd and stultifying in a culture that insists that abundant and fecund women are children until, at some arbitrary date, they have finished their education. No doubt this artificially prolonged ...”

“... The aloofness, which became chillier as de Valera’s sense of himself as a man of destiny grew, may have been the result of maternal rejection. Born in the United States to an Irish mother in 1882, de Valera was sent, aged two, back to the family home in Limerick, where he was brought up by an uncle. It was a grim life, digging potatoes by day and sleeping ...”

“... immigrant shanties, rather than the extremes of rural despair I had imagined. He said that the PRI may have given the peasants land but they have provided no infrastructure. It’s a pioneering society left to its own devices, a cacophony of religions, languages and ideologies from all over Chiapas and, indeed, the Republic. Divided, pugnacious and ...”

“... a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something to do with the fact that I worked almost entirely at the House of Commons and rarely visited the office. With one exception, we members of the political staff were like stokers in a coal-fired ship, shovelling fuel into the furnaces in ...”

“... Nemerov – whose voice is heard throughout – for this kind of mild civic editorial. Updike may not, in truth, know how to write poetry; but his deep talent is such that even the slightest poem rarely flows away without leaving some valuable deposit. As in the novels, Updike chooses a detail, expands and warms it. A mosquito is seen thus: ‘on the fine ...”

“... tunnelling machines now lie buried deep beneath the sea, heroic martyrs to their own monument. May they rest in peace – belated builders of a dream, immured in deep blue ...”