“... against the power of the towns and the fiscal authorities. It was not the squire but the second-home owner whom the peasants hated – one might say, especially if he worked for Whitehall. Sidelights on this story come from all directions. Ladurie notes that French customs of inheritance are almost wildly variable, but have been recorded in great detail in ...”

“... state. In those years they flew high over the more typical officers of British Intelligence at home and abroad, whose natural sympathies were right-wing, and who tended to side politically with Hitler and Mussolini rather than with anything which stank of Communism. Surprisingly quickly, after the war, the enemy changed. Suddenly Germany and Italy were ...”

“... with the notion of conquest by overwhelming foreign force one that came uncomfortably close to home. The armoured units began to take their oaths elsewhere, and over the following decades Yadin’s version of the Masada myth was picked apart. One difficulty was his interpretation of the archaeological remains. Even he didn’t insist that the potsherds ...”

“... Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is impossible to tell the truth and very hard to make a mistake. If ...”

“... cigarette. ‘Officer, you got me. You’d better send me back to the UK. Deport me. I want to go home. By BA, preferably.’ They still had a smoking section. She’d hoped for better. She narrowed her eyes and gave me another mean look, then told me to wait while she left to make a phone call. Twenty minutes later she returned and grudgingly dismissed me ...”

“... which is that dark clouds were gathering, or, as he puts it, ‘bigger and darker birds had come home to roost by the turn of the decade – and with an ominously settled air as though, like the Tower ravens, they intended to stay with us longer than just overnight.’ In effect, back to the Thirties. It had to be so, if you think about it. The Thirties ...”

“... 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 ...”