“... 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 ...”

“... it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the ...”

“... was in a hospital ward when I saw the photos he was posting on Facebook: ‘Welcome to my new home,’ he joked. It seemed fitting that my Facebook feed was filling up with posts from a mental institution. As the conflict over Ukraine intensified my social media feeds became more and more unsettling. Acquaintances from Moscow, the ‘creatives’ who make ...”

“... Lindisfarne, Cuthbert’s monks were carrying his body from place to place in search of a new home. Provisions had already run low when they discovered that their last cheese had been stolen from its hiding place. Taking counsel, they did the obvious thing and asked their saint to turn the thief into a fox. At once a vixen appeared with a cheese in its ...”

“... other type has Kipling, Ian Hay and P.G. Wodehouse), and in the average well-to-do home’. Initial reviews of Personal Pleasures – ‘most amusing’, ‘delightful’, ‘an ideal bedside book’ – were along these lines, calculated to please a publisher but suggesting something altogether slighter than the reality. In her introduction ...”