“... career as a novelist. The very title reminds us he was a Victorian, only two years younger than Lord Alfred Douglas. His most celebrated novels of English life were published in the 1930s. Then he moved to Wales, became very Cymric, historical and metaphysical; a sage, visited by disciples, he wrote of mysteries and antiquities until his death, aged 91, in ...”

“... noting the ‘gravity’ of the offences. In August, the Labour Party’s spokesman on home affairs, John Fraser, wrote to the home secretary, Robert Carr, about the cases. The Sunday Times report on Fraser’s letter said that he had asked Carr ‘to pay special regard to the method of proof used by transport ...”

“... and the kinds of gift they could demand for their service. By contrast, William de Longchamp, lord chancellor in the late 12th century, tried to improve his public image by writing his own praise poems and paying French musicians to sing them in the streets.Medieval minstrels left few written traces, and the references that do appear in texts from the ...”

“... self-hatred, Bobby is entrapped into firebombing a supposed Nazi headquarters. Longing for a ‘home’ among the Jews, Bobby allows his Irish partner, his only ‘family’, to be gunned down by a black drug lord – only to discover that the old Jewish woman whose murder has led him astray was killed by black ghetto ...”

“... Soror ...’, first written in 1925 at the age of 21, she now says that ‘I feel as completely at home with this story as if the idea for it had come to me this morning.’ ‘Anna, Soror ...’ is set in the grim fortress of Castel Sant’ Elmo in 16th-century Naples, and tells of the growth of an incestuous passion between the son and daughter of the prison ...”

“... Kultur here, not mass murder. The self-appointed members of the master race made themselves at home by turning Polish palaces into beer halls – often after stuffing their pockets with treasure. Governor-General Hans Frank toured the ruins of the Royal Palace in Warsaw and casually tore silver eagles off the canopy over a throne. Meanwhile Frau Frank went ...”

“... first and barely made it through to lunchtime: they scored 52 in all, the fewest runs ever in a home Test (46 from the bat; the splendid Ray Lindwall 6 for 20). The Australian openers were past this shameful mark inside the hour. Don Bradman wasn’t needed until after tea, when he came emotively in at his usual first wicket down. Because he had said that ...”

“... and paternalism. When Marie-Sophie and her ragged followers tiptoe unannounced into the mayor’s home (Ti-Cirique, carrying copies of Césaire’s books to be signed, loses his nerve at the gate), Césaire’s first reaction is fear. Marie-Sophie has to recite a passage from his early epic Cahier d’un retour au pays natal before he calms down enough to ...”

“... like shepherds over their flocks, supplying their every need. Christians are apt to think of the Lord Our Shepherd as a kindly creature, forgetting that shepherds, too, have to eat, but in another of Plato’s reflections on the Golden Age the sinister hints become more obvious. Socrates has been describing a rather minimalist Eden in the early years of ...”

“... As Macaulay points out, there were plenty of other onlookers ready to risk being Godfreyed. At home, newspaper reports, medals, maps and eulogies combined to bring the public in on the action that they were now directly helping to finance.Eighty years on and several charters later, the bank had become a byword for solidity. People started using the phrase ...”

“... a gun to my father’s head and they ripped his shirt off,’ she says. ‘He had a tattoo of our Lord on the cross. They said: “You Fenian bastard, you have an hour to get out.”’ By the time the children got home, their father had left for his mother’s house in Catholic West Belfast. Other local Catholic families ...”

“... and A Newspaper History of England 1792-1793 (1967); Clive Emsley, in his influential essay ‘The Home Office and its Sources of Information and Investigation 1791-1801’, in the English Historical Review for 1979; and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin in her study The Anti-Jacobins 1798-1800 (1988). At the very end of 1788 George III was still apparently mad, and ...”

“... the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the ...”

“... Wolsey took his place in a genuinely conciliar regime. Far from exploiting his position as Lord Chancellor to harry his political rivals in Star Chamber, he demonstrated to the rich and powerful, without fear or favour, their equality before the law with the poor and weak. What then of his legendary success in removing or isolating his enemies from the ...”

“... patriarchal conception of marriage. After 1800, and especially during the long tenure of Lord Chancellor Eldon (1801-27), an increasingly conservative reaction set in: even as the courts continued to enforce such contracts, they so hedged them with restrictions that the effect, in Staves’s reading, was the ‘reimposition of deep patriarchal ...”