“... 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 ...”

“... gaze. All the brothers travelled widely and spoke and read several languages. When they were at home they entertained generously and among the regular guests at Woodside while Sarah was growing up was William Paley, the archdeacon whose most influential work, Natural Theology, published in 1802, propounded the argument from design that draws the analogy ...”

“... conglomeration of slum housing, religious bigotry and urban decay’ – in the words of the lord provost of the time – to a place of gleaming post-industrial glamour. Gray’s fame and Glasgow’s upgrade came about at the same time, and are in lots of ways connected: Gray had a brief stint as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a ...”

“... army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home. In Libya in 2011 the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine-guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, which was mostly brought about by Nato air ...”

“... Israel-Hizbullah warfare have produced more than five thousand Lebanese casualties. When I walked home from dinner at the end of this worst day in this latest war, our western half of the city looked pretty much as it does in periods of peace: cafés filled with families having coffee or ice cream, shops open and brightly lit, boys kicking footballs on ...”

“... for the 1788 settlement, neither of which can inspire a warm glow in the modern Australian or home country breast. One is that England’s jails, then as now, were bursting at the seams with prisoners scooped up by the mindless severity of the laws protecting property. There being no provision for life imprisonment for those reprieved from the ...”

“... by the scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot, the Academy was less sniffy. The eminent scientist Lord Kelvin said that Roentgen’s X-rays were a hoax. Edison’s electric lamp was declared an impossibility, and because it was an impossibility his fellow researchers wouldn’t go to see it even when Edison used it to light up the streets around his ...”

“... took place ‘when Wall Nutts came just in season, and black Cherrys were going out’. Around Lord Mayor’s Day on 9 November, there was a crush at London’s docks for the first sprats of the season; these little fish were wholesome, cheap and tasty – one hawker called them ‘God’s blessing for the poor’. An early commitment to sustainability can ...”

“... 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 ...”