“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Margaret Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in 1931, going around to the galleries. We went to the Pierre Colle Gallery in the Rue de la Boétie where there was a show of Dali’s. Dali came in poor and emaciated. He had no suit jacket and wore a ...”

“... giving in to him. For Grigg it was the social exclusiveness that was objectionable; for Princess Margaret it was the inclusiveness: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ For Prince Philip, the main enthusiast for abolition, it was presumably the agonising boredom. The passage of time has done little to improve the image of ...”

“... Turnbull, he was one of the ‘most well-known anthropologists’ of the 20th century, along with Margaret Mead and Louis Leakey. For many of the more austere members of the profession, to say that these three are ‘well-known anthropologists’ is a bit like saying that Vanna White is a well-known lexicographer. To be fair, each of them did something that ...”

“... and swing, surrounded by triangular patches of bush and mucky flowerbed. Man-made grass-slopes rose to the side of them, bordered by the kerb and a car-park marked out with paint. Those rocks and slopes, for many of us, were our first domain, and they’d prove themselves equal to representing the entire universe. The way to the other squares in the scheme ...”

“... 2009 to 2014, the number of cases referred to the Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Service rose from 97 to 697. Transgender children in the UK today have the option of delaying puberty by taking hormone blockers; they can take cross-sex hormones from 16 and opt for sex reassignment surgery from the age of 18. Cassie Wilson’s daughter Melanie ...”

“... best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her way in a masculine environment by behaving like a man, only more so. Cooke is careful to avoid special pleading. Her tactful descriptions of Smithson as a woman who ‘did not invite closeness’, and to whom ...”

“... and epigraphs are the names and catalogue descriptions of roses. In the novel the isolation of a rose-garden, the luxurious vice of gardening, the reader’s consciousness of literary cultivation taking place amid generic borders, all summon a broad background of traditions and values which are tested against the sharply contemporary commitments to self, job ...”

“... the surgeon’s hand half a year’, during which he ‘did undergo much pain and sorrow’. Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who ...”

“... His Holiness James Kelman? That would be a turn-up for the Booker. I would imagine that Sister Margaret Atwood, or Brother Banville, is more likely to win the prize. On the short list is Rose Tremain, who teaches at the University of East Anglia. Two of the judges are feminists, and one of them also teaches at the ...”

“... efficient and comprehensive’ service to every British citizen. Colchester’s new public library rose to the challenge magnificently (i.e. better than Chelmsford – unfairly, locals thought, chosen to be Essex’s county town).My grandmother would never have dared to join that library. Apart from anything else, its previous site – it was founded as a ...”

“... companion and host. He tells the story here of a previous Australian Labor leader who told Margaret Whitlam, his wife, that no one would ever get him going to South-East Asia: ‘You never know what you’ll catch.’ Mr Whitlam, by contrast, is rarely happier than when abroad. He translated the menu for me in Sofia, discoursing on the etymology of ...”

“... third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This summer, Murray won Wimbledon and Chris Froome followed Wiggins to victory in the Tour de France. The cup ran over. There’s plenty of material for a different story, too. Woodward followed his world cup triumph with a poor Six Nations ...”

“... originally Scottish by way of Ulster, Quakers or Presbyterians amending to Anglicanism as they rose by professional achievement from the middle classes to a confluence with the upper. The school, university and Army pages – Eton, Christ Church and the Rifle Brigade – are littered with characters, or at any rate names, from a Waugh ...”

“... may well ask whether, any more than Stow, she has avoided looking at this lost world through rose-tinted spectacles. How sure can we be that the pre-Reformation city enjoyed unity in religion? If it did, in any significant measure, this was a unity secured through the reconciliation of difference and diversity, the diversity of 106 parishes, perhaps as ...”