“... even though Leo’s mother had been a Hungarian Jew and Leo himself had been attacked by Lord Haw-Haw as ‘the half-Jew Leopold Amery’. At one stage Jack asserted that the victory of the German armies was ‘necessary in order that small children shall no longer be the victims of the Jews’. He also attempted to recruit British POWs to fight for ...”

“... slogans. More attentive reading, however, revealed that this was poetry: ‘I sing and appeal: Lord, give birth to a calf!’ ‘Look at the fat thighs/Of this obscene wall./Here the nuns at night/Remove Christ’s trousers.’ ‘Citizens, change/The underclothes of your souls!’ These words came courtesy of the Order of Imaginists, a group of ...”

“... is become of Jane?’ ‘Oh, she is gone to dwell by London-wall’) and reminisce (‘But, Lord, the prankes that we mad-wenches playde’), especially about drinking (‘No Musique in the evenings we did lacke,/Such dauncing, Coussen, you would hardly thinke it/Whole pottles of the daintiest burned Sacke,/T’would do a Wench good at the hart to ...”

“... exporting papermaking machinery to 56 countries. Hewlett, born in 1874, felt quite at home with the paternalism which could flourish within a firm that remained in the hands of a single family, though he deplored ‘the harder and less human atmosphere’ which came with technological change. He didn’t disdain the Johnson’s dividends he ...”

“... the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors. Before the publication of his first book, Continent, in 1986, Jim Crace worked as a freelance features journalist for the Sunday Telegraph. He’d written a few short stories, some ...”

“... who had hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were ...”

“... pied piper, or ‘mouse queen’. In fact she loathed mice and had been kept prisoner in her own home by packs of the creatures scurrying around. Sleep was out of the question: as soon as she shut her eyes, the mice would crawl over her. Far from feeding them, she spent her time chasing as many as she could out of her house onto the roof . . . And so ...”

“... as a lush Gainsborough melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James Mason (the villainous Lord Manderstoke) and Stewart Granger (heroic Harry). The Balliol-educated son of an Oxford don, Sadleir was a publisher with Constable and eventually ran the firm. He was also the greatest Victorian bibliophile of his generation and his collection is now held in ...”

“... of my son,’ Coates said in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award. ‘I can’t go home and tell him that it’s going to be OK … I just don’t have that right, I just don’t have that power.’ The power he does have, the power anyone who is black can have, he decides, is a negative one: it lies in the refusal to buy into the possibility ...”

“... carrying rifles and riot shields descended on Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis. At the home of ChingLy ‘Scott’ Thao, a US citizen, they knocked quickly before shattering the front door with a battering ram. They yanked Thao, who was wearing only bright blue boxers and Crocs, out into the sub-zero cold and bundled him into a black SUV. For about ...”

“... a small rundown house in Shoreham. The cottage feeling certainly was primitive: he called his new home ‘Rat Abbey’. Palmer’s rural retreat was companionable. His father sold up, followed his son to Shoreham and settled in a spacious house, which was just as well since Rat Abbey could not accommodate many guests and Palmer had numerous visitors. He was ...”

“... detachment of a scholar of great brilliance. He has the sensibilities of someone deeply at home in the strange times he chronicles. He knew most of the protagonists of this book: his is a small country where murderers and victims lived side by side. His father was a senior official in post-1956 Hungary; as a boy he holidayed with the executioners of ...”

“... me free …” that sort of thing. But where was God now, with Heaven full of astronauts and the Lord overthrown?’ It’s a question that many have grappled with, including Joni Mitchell, lightly paraphrased here. The lines are from ‘The Same Situation’ on her 1974 album Court and Spark: Still I sent up my prayer Wondering where it had to go With ...”

“... in the mid-1930s – his own late forties. Not much wildlife about and we were thinking of heading home when a plump cock pheasant whirred across the ride looking for a spot to roost. I raised the gun, but while I was still fumbling with the safety catch an elderly figure leaped out with startling agility from a bend in the avenue. He wore a battered felt hat ...”

“... children of the 1860s. Jim liked to tell the story of the silver paper knife his father brought home on one occasion with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and how his blushing mother had called her ‘“a shameless hussy” and hid the knife under a clock’. Like stories about covering up piano legs, it was Ede’s generation’s way of laughing ...”