“... painting, perfuming and manicure. He soon fell out with Wilde, partly because of his distaste for Lord Alfred Douglas, and made it a condition of his work for the Yellow Book that Wilde be excluded from the list of contributors. The veto was carried over to the Savoy, first published in January 1896, and insisted on yet again when he and Symons planned a ...”

“... as a young American student, George Ticknor, was to note on meeting him in 1815. ‘I have seen Lord Byron,’ Lady Blessington recorded in her diary on 1 April 1823, ‘and am disappointed.’ It is hardly surprising that people should have confused the poet with his heroes. After the success of the first two cantos of the Pilgrimage, he churned out the ...”

“... room, smiling at her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out in feigned alarm: ‘My lord . . . what means this?’He smiled. As though she did not know! But he enjoyed the masquerade as much as she did. Of late she had perhaps been overeager, and a certain amount of resistance had always appealed to him. So she protested but her heart was not in ...”

“... she thought.’ The happy couple briefly encounter Gjorg at an inn, as he is on his way home from paying the blood tax. Diana and Gjorg are entranced by each other. Both spend the time remaining to them on the High Plateau hoping with increasing desperation to catch sight of each other one more time, as the days count down to the morning on which ...”

“... tribunal’, and therefore no shared understanding. In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on from generation to generation’, life in the democratic age was unmoored, indeterminate, even meaningless. Tocqueville refused to accept this anarchic new world at face value. Instead, like a ...”

“... It opens, like Buddenbrooks, on a portrait of haut bourgeois opulence: the family at home in the family town house, the family business, the second breakfasts and creamy puddings and silver plate. The plush is thick, the family ties as sturdy as the bell-pulls, the fortune as solid as the mahogany: except that fortunes and territory in Europe can ...”

“... and at least you would have had something to do; in between the waiting, and the writing letters home, there would be bursts lit by pink light. In a way, wasn’t that a better life for the body so full of strength, so capable of saving JonBenét?What is a guy for? It’s a religious question. The teacher is maybe a Buddhist now, but he grew up going to St ...”

“... to have lost money on the venture – and he shipped out in 1847 on the same boat that delivered Lord Dalhousie, the new governor-general of India. For three years, Hooker travelled through India, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan by foot, pony and elephant; climbed mountains up to a height of almost 20,000 feet (at which elevation he confessed he was a ‘gone ...”

“... London, where she sat between Marina Warner (in yellow satin hotpants and a heart-shaped bib) and Lord Snowdon. She won and managed not to get expelled, but was in trouble with the family for turning her wicked stepmother into a ‘beautiful milkmaid’ in her winning essay. ‘You went to fucking public school, didn’t you?’ another girl said to her when ...”

“... visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk, Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen (‘Diaghilev I knew and liked, a strange genius of a man if ever there was one. But Fokine ...”

“... Now the church is found to be open so no key is required, the ringers go up the tower as we walk home, and as we are putting the key in our own door the bells start.When we first came to the village in 1966 one used to be woken in the night by curlews calling. This doesn’t happen now, though at Bleak Bank Farm they mark where the nests are so the eggs ...”

“... had already begun to establish the mainly female network that would fund his missionary work back home. Today, he is remembered by Indians as a manly pioneer of Hindu nationalism, who advised his followers to eat meat and bulk up their biceps. In the West, he is known, if at all, in equally essentialist terms, as the Oriental mystic who taught Americans to do ...”

“... on their ‘Manners & Customs’ marking the beginnings of scientific ethnography, and returned home from his global grand tour with 1000 species of plants, 500 birds and 500 fish, as well as news of the almost paradisal breadfruit. Boswell enthused provocatively and Johnson responded in character: ‘No, Sir (holding up a slice of a good loaf), this is ...”

“... piano, two Trojan horses that brought the arts into the hitherto philistine middle-class European home. Johnson’s anecdotes and even his jokes conform to journalistic propriety. They aren’t there just for colour or to display the community’s diversity, but are targeted as in a newspaper on the private lives and hidden weaknesses of public figures. He ...”

“... for Rome a linen suit), her possessions (the good inherited pieces in her vamped-up Victorian home), her abstemious but carefully orthodox taste in food and drink, her irreproachably tasteful vocabulary and piety to the memory of her mother, the canon’s widow. The people in the novel react to Ianthe wholly in terms of these outward and visible ...”