“... 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 ...”

“... poetry was a distraction that he found delight in, and which he kept entirely separate from his home life, and his business life – neither of them suitable or relevant to an understanding of his poetry.’ In particular, Harmonium (1923), Stevens’s scintillating first volume, seems to leap fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. What is there at ...”

“... post until after Temple’s death three years later – first accompanying the Earl of Berkeley, Lord Justice of Ireland, to Dublin as his domestic chaplain in 1699, and in 1700 accepting the living of the parish of Laracor in County Meath, half a day’s ride north of Dublin. This was a period of great disappointment and bitterness in his professional ...”

“... yet hilariously, censors. He came up against the British censors over the text of Endgame. The Lord Chamberlain (‘Lord Chamberpot’, as he fondly referred to him) objected to the word ‘bastard’ in the line about God (‘the bastard, he doesn’t exist’) After protracted but fruitless negotiations, an exasperated ...”

“... the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was ...”

“... boxes, ashtrays, candelabra, pepperpots, decanter labels): tribal stuff, to keep him moored to home ground, which figured in all the colonial residences of the British, as can be seen in photographs in memoirs like Priscilla Napier’s A Late Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough ...”

“... promoters, confirm their allegiance – as Ackroyd points out – through their choice of title. Lord Rogers of Riverside, author of the Dome. Lord Foster of Thames Bank with his wobbly bridge. It is inevitable that Ackroyd, with his belief in eternal recurrence, in London as an organic entity forever renewing itself from ...”

“... lurking there, too: of stealth, on the visitors’ part; of unpreparedness, on the part of the home team. You can know, in the sense of being acquainted with, certain social refinements, and a character asserts, with some show of truth in the particular context, that ‘men don’t know’ about such things. Or rather: ‘They know in such matters almost ...”

“... through the system. A few weeks after I first met Andy and Martha, I visited Michael at his home in North-West London. He showed me a letter sent by the Ministry of Defence to his late mother, Mary, in 2011 and signed by the defence secretary at the time, Liam Fox. ‘I apologise for Majella’s death and offer you my heartfelt sympathy,’ it ...”