“... Alexandra crying, and the name stuck. Within a couple of years, Gully’s parents divorced. Dee took her to England, borrowed a house and wrote about ‘London life’ for the New York Times, until the Sunday Express hired her as its book reviewer. Gully’s father took her for holidays ‘in his snappy white Mercedes ...”

“... in which individuals actively traded on the stock market, owned portfolios of shares and took responsibility for their gains and losses. These shrewd, well-informed capitalists were intended to have a direct interest in the companies they invested in.Not surprisingly, this vision of financial citizenship proved unrealistic. Few people had the ...”

“... they had adopted this course in order to let me understand that it was as well to withdraw. I took the hint, and managed to rejoin modern civilisation in the shape of the barouche kindly placed at my service by the authorities in the great outer square.’ The recognition of Kipling as a Sahib generates in the narrative the stylistic markers of cultural ...”

“... backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I followed the lives of divas, queens and stars; one of these was the pictorial weekly Oggi, modelled on Life, but also a harbinger of Hello! in its lurid curiosity about its rich, mostly doomed subjects. The women who appeared in its pages were usually ...”

“... Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before and since, owes its popularity to the fact that ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ is still for many ...”

“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been an abandoned child, found, by whom is not ...”

“... Even now, as I write the name, it has a strange resonance. In 1798 it was where ‘our side’ took a large number of Protestant men, women and children, put them in a barn and burned them to death. It does not come up in the songs, and I have no memory of my father, who was a local historian, talking or writing about it. The landscape of north ...”

“... that Mary was ‘a beauty’ with many young men to choose among. That the one she decided on, John Moore, was known only for his sense of humour and love of the theatre is puzzling at first – she has seemed so earnest – but it turns out that performance was something she too enjoyed. Pretending to be someone or something else, preferably a small ...”

“... disappear with progress. Stuck with the obstinate facts of national ambition in the territories it took over, the Soviet leadership produced the famous ‘national in form, socialist in content’ formula which allowed nations to be recognised within the Soviet sphere – and indeed, in many ways promoted – while at the same time their essence was eroded ...”

“... through a population is more rapid. The fatal flu of 1918 came and went in a couple of years; it took only weeks to dispatch its victims. They had little time to reflect on their condition. The high-risk groups were the same as with most diseases – children and the old, the least articulate – rather than those in the prime of life (though Aids, of ...”

“... oddly lively – there was a crowd outside, the lobby was full of men in suits hanging about, it took an age to get registered at the front desk, the bloke getting the attention of both receptionists looked oddly familiar, a bit like Alessandro del … the penny dropped. Juventus were staying at the same hotel, on the night before a home game. There were a ...”

“... then living and after his two half-brothers had both been killed while serving in it. He at once took the rank of colonel but it’s not clear who or what he commanded, nor what if anything he achieved. By his own self-enhancing account, whose plausibility Todd demolishes item by item by reference to the French and German records, he was a résistant of ...”

“... is another generally acknowledged genius of the game world. His first great creation, The Sims, took the ideas of Abraham Maslow about mankind’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ (food, shelter, security and so on, up to ‘peak experiences’) and applied them to a game in which users could set the rules for their various characters, and then allow them to go off ...”

“... wisdom to laymen. From about the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th, as Sir John Habakkuk, who thinks more kindly of the legal profession than Hogg and Godwin, shows in his massive and compelling account of English land-ownership over three hundred years, the most common of the ‘entails created’ by the lawyers was the strict ...”

“... shifts take place. He does refer to one theological factor of some historical importance. John Cotton, who left England for New England in 1633, was an experimental predestinarian on this side of the Atlantic who slipped into something very like antinomianism in America. He did so by reviving Calvin. Assurance is the essence of saving faith, and faith ...”