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“... the times of Francis I and through the château and the brothel before it was transferred to the home. Yet the author has surprisingly little to say about spas or eaux minérales. He is informative, however, on washbasins, fountains and washhouses. On the first, he reminds us that the French word for washbasin, lavabo, is borrowed from the language of ...”

“... and alarmed if his gout did not return regularly. Besides, gout was very much a mark of status. Lord Chesterfield said it was ‘the distemper of a gentleman, whereas the rheumatism is the distemper of a hackney coachman’. It attacked not only the wealthy but the creative, which meant that no man of letters could afford to be without it. Some thought it ...”

“... Nobel Prize, especially in the US, and especially among people who have read little of him since Lord of the Flies. For it seems that the perception of Golding’s quality does depend in some measure on acquaintance with his work as a whole. There is nothing very surprising about this. The need to understand particular works in terms of an artist’s whole ...”

“... Her imagination seems to have been inflamed by chatting with Jane Cumming, and with a maid at home, who proclaimed that one of the teachers must surely be a man, and that both should ‘be burned’. After this conversation, Miss Munro, who was a little deaf, took to lying with her bad ear on the pillow. None of the pupils’ testimony was ...”

“... herself seems often to speak on behalf of some public body. And sure enough she speaks up for Lord Robbins and her other colleagues, for the most part robustly impenitent though prepared to concede ‘a disturbing development, which we did not anticipate when we reported in 1963’ – that is to say, ‘a marked swing against science in the schools and a ...”

“... Russian prototypes aside, he essentially belongs in the tradition of the American cop, his true home a Warner Brothers movie. He’s not expected to answer awkward existential questions: but he has something, an integrity of his own, that only a hero empty of everything else seems to possess. The empty heroes of Hemingway and the earlier American crime ...”

“... from his Cambridge friend, Matthews, in which tidbits of information about the homosexual scene at home are given to Byron, and arch requests are made for news in return about the traveller’s successes among the youths of Greece, Turkey and Albania. For the rest, Crompton relies on previously published biographies (those by Leslie Marchand and Doris Langley ...”

“... still more or less current: ‘what time do you have?’ Proust, though surely more of a stay-at-home than Zola, concurred with him about ‘those marvellous places, railway stations’: indeed, the title of his masterpiece echoes the most evocative phrase in any language for a booking-hall, la salle des pas perdus. Often enough, the vicissitudes of railway ...”

“... the sky in their quest for hostile aircraft ... And here is his unwitting version (1915) of the Home Guard’s determination to repel invasion in 1940: Yesterday I drilled with the Ditchingham and Bungay Volunteer Defense Corps on the Common, whereof I am a platoon Commander. The spectacle was distinctly funny – that of a lot of determined old gents ...”

“... popular press – to change the metaphor – a very different animal from what it was in, say, Lord Beaverbrook’s time, and Mr Foot was a great friend and employee of Beaverbrook’s. His complaints against the ‘personal venom and malice’ of ‘Mrs Thatcher’s beknighted friends in the press’ – he retains something of a soft spot for Mrs ...”

“... language has its way with him. A lot turns on how he reacts to this condition, once it is brought home to him. Graham’s attitude is light years away from those who, having discovered duplicities in language, are determined to root them out; or those others who, having discovered the duplicitousness, delightedly aggravate it. The better alternative, Graham ...”

“... allegedly discovers Zaitun to have been in 1271. If Jacob had really wanted something to write home about from Zaitun, he would have had to stick around to see matters out. When the resistance against the Mongols reached its endgame, and the main Imperial family were driven from their capital, it was to Zaitun that they retreated, to beg a reluctant Pu for ...”

“... Farm, who had to slave for her harsh aunt Miranda Sawyer in order to pay off the mortgage on her home. Fleda, in Queechy, had the same problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There ...”

“... which she assumes it would be. Every night when she says her prayers, she begins by saying: ‘Lord, I can never thank you enough for the parents you gave me.’ She was an only child, and her parents were devoted to her. When her father first saw her in the hospital nursery ‘the other babies,’ he always claimed, ‘were just lying still, but I was ...”

“... safe (to protect it from the eyes of ‘all and sundry’); there is no doubt that successive home secretaries, including Labour’s Frank Soskice and the Conservatives’ Reginald Maudling, also sought to prevent the story coming out or – as Scott became more vocal – being given credence. Bloch also charts the conversations – going back to 1968 ...”