“... The evidence and argument were over by lunchtime and he phoned his wife to say he’d be home for tea. At two o’clock the judge began delivering his extempore judgment. He outlined the issues; he then went through his notes of evidence, indicating what testimony he accepted and what he didn’t; then he turned to the law, citing substantial ...”

“... de Littleton had noted that children born abroad were ‘out of the allegiance of our sovereign lord the king’ and therefore out of ‘the king’s protection’, and ‘out of help and protect by the king’s law or by the king’s writ’. To be born a subject was to have access to the rights of subjecthood. In the 16th century, ‘Egiptians’ (that ...”

“... often. I just don’t care for any of them. 7 March, Yorkshire. To Oxenholme, half an hour from home and on the edge of the Lake District, where we catch a Virgin train to Glasgow. It’s a brisk ride, only two hours and seems less than that because the scenery is so uninterruptedly rural and sometimes spectacular. Virgin trains, though, are designed on the ...”

“... Lunch with the Prime Minister. Exotic foods on every side. And then Air India, first class, back home! Maybe my condition was self-inflicted. Or it could have been that conference. Colitis can be set off by an allergy. Just think of all those exotic and not always compatible intellectual spices thrown together: Bella Akhmadulina and Chinua Achebe, Régis ...”

“... and then in schools’ broadcasting for the BBC. The marriage worked – Bowen liked making a home, and entertaining – and lasted as a fond childless companionship (though she had passionate love affairs) until Alan’s death in 1952. They lived in Northampton and Oxford, then eventually in Clarence Terrace near Regent’s Park, spending what time they ...”

“... see why the rest should worry you.’ Enter his alibi: Laurel Gray, a neighbour who saw him come home with Atkinson. At the threshold of the captain’s office she raises an eyebrow, just slightly, and over the next few moments it becomes clear that, for the purposes of irascible romance, Dix and she are the same person: unintimidated, less than ...”

“... coal mine at Longannet flooded and closed down for ever in March 2002, a man called George came home from the pit to find his telephone ringing. ‘Dinnae worry, big man, we’ll see you’re no stuck for work.’ This is a nation at home in hard, stony times. It will find its own way in the world. This is a cold, hard ...”

“... when he was out composing. Poets must also entrench themselves in sound and syntax, learn to be at home in rhythms, etymological echoes, idioms and vocabulary. This linguistic digging in can be quickened by listening to other tongues, yet it is almost unknown for a poet to settle in a language – as distinct from an accent – learned after childhood. Only a ...”

“... will be locked up in the hands of [the booksellers], the Tonsons and Lintots of the age,’ Lord Camden explained, ‘till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are.’ The power that the intellectual property regime gave to trade privileges, at the expense of royal privileges, seemed to degrade the nobility of ...”

“... Hansford Johnson – caught, to begin with, in the unselfconscious prose of her adolescent Boots Home diaries, 8” x 5”, a week to a spread – gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping ...”

“... On the campaign trail he played up his admiration for British values and backed the cause of Irish Home Rule, garnering the support of Irish MPs. Patel shows us how Naoroji painstakingly formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s ...”

“... that comes from having had a glittering career at the forefront of tearful simplicity. ‘Good Lord,’ she says of AnnieLee, now singing for beers and fries at the Cat’s Paw Saloon, ‘that girl’s so gorgeous she could sing like a barn cat in heat and folks’ll be calling her the next Maria Callas.’AnnieLee goes back to her alter ego’s mansion in ...”

“... came: while Mac Donagh emphasised the sharp contrast between conditions in Kerry and in the Home Counties, he never lost sight of the fact that they were together part of a Hiberno-British world distinguished by its social and physical diversity rather than its homogeneity. Furthermore, throughout the first volume Mac Donagh demonstrated that ...”

“... be missing a lot of jokes. When Gordon speaks of other writers, ‘including he who was to become Lord Archer’, and a little later tells us that he was employed to teach Prince Andrew to write grammatically, I am at a loss. I feel there must be a joke in there somewhere. Of course it is a perfectly acceptable ploy for a writer to be deliberately silly but I ...”

“... of frenzied activity. The scene in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade in which Lord Raglan and his party view the charge from a nearby hilltop is (perhaps deliberately) very like watching the making of a film. The terminology of film – ‘cut’, ‘shoot’, ‘action’, ‘reload’ – is the terminology of battle and it is a battle ...”