“... counting each day to the hols, Ever your lovingest, Pater’; ‘Your next letter must be care of Thomas Cook – Son, Cairo. Please let it be a full one. You don’t know how one hungers for news of people one loves.’ Of the two deeply loved children, Elsie, the less obsessively cherished, was perhaps the ...”

“... Church. Goethe, into whose hands the unpublished manuscript afterwards fell, translated the more topographical and antiquarian parts, and omitted the political peroration. Back in England, Knight began to build himself a highly original, irregular country house, Downton Castle in Herefordshire, which is Classical within and castellated without. Nicholas ...”

“... strange world, not least because it’s where we’re all heading – 55 million of us annually, more than six thousand every hour. Startling and affecting, her candid, compassionate investigation is based on interviews with those who work with dead bodies. We can spare ourselves by closing the book – but we shouldn’t, because Campbell is scared too and ...”

“... the beard covers part of the cheeks as well as the chin, and the line of the jaw is firmer and more defined. The king seems altogether more masculine. The touching up of the painting was probably influenced by a view of Richard that had been circulating at least since the time of his deposition in 1399, but is it ...”

“... of the wisdom that only experience can provide, having completed an excellent education of the more bookish sort at home. They astonish their hosts along the way with Sherlock-Holmes-like inferences from sharply observed particulars strewn in their path; Walpole’s homegrown example for this sort of ‘accidental sagacity’ was ‘of my Lord ...”

“... wrote a diary, nine large volumes of it, which he began on 1 January 1660 and continued to write more or less daily until fears that he was losing his sight led him to abandon it on 31 May 1669. The diary is the product of a unique set of circumstances. At its beginning England was in the process of remaking itself after the collapse of the Commonwealth, and ...”

“... and vice versa? These questions matter today, when the population of the United States is much more assertively Christian than that of any other nation in the North Atlantic West. ‘Either I am a Christian or I am not,’ Congressman Souder explains, and, as a Christian, he has ‘an obligation to change things’. The floor of Congress is a good place to ...”

“... of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 square feet in more than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 ...”

“... whole thing was clandestine, the other children weren’t supposed to be really there at all, any more than that picturesque backdrop of lake and trees and cows. Meanwhile, insulated and apart, vicarage life went on. In the church, in bars, in books (grandpa) or in a scented bedroom fug of dreams of home in South Wales (grandma). That is, of Tonypandy in the ...”

“... undefined and undefinable beneath them’. This is apparent in the poems he wrote while living on Thomas, Lord Fairfax’s estate in Yorkshire, where he was appointed tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary some time after Fairfax resigned as Commander-in-Chief – or Lord General – of the Parliamentary forces. Fairfax resigned because he did not want to take ...”

“... spent a year in England escaping from the Franco-Prussian War. His eldest son, Lucien, spent more than half his life here. Lucien was the gentlest, sweetest, least practical of men, it seems. His wife, Esther, the tough one, had two goals, the art historian John Rewald wrote: ‘to make friends happy while at the same time running his life by any means ...”

“... the film then cuts directly to a woman in bed, waking up to be comforted by her male companion (Thomas de Pourquery). He tells her that she has been saying ‘Mother, Mother’, which relates to the right realm of trouble, but not really to what we have just seen. The film’s story, based on a real event, is about a mother who left her 15-month-old child ...”

“... Conquest of the Useless; and Bruce Robinson’s farcical Künstlerroman, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. However, I’m not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on exposure to their work in a new medium the viewer, reader or listener ...”

“... the Roman amphitheatre, and of the collapsed basilica and forum’? Perhaps they simply found it more convenient. The old Roman bridge across the Thames was impassable by that time, and the Strand was the first dry and elevated land west of the London Fen, and was close to the ford that was then the only crossing place. In the late seventh century a new ...”

“... Thomas Friedman is so much the kind of American that the rest of the world likes to despise that it’s a fair assumption he has, at least in part, adopted the pose consciously. He calls himself a ‘tourist with attitude’ and his attitude is that of the know-it-all, ‘wise up, you dumb cluck’ American journalist who is here to tell you your economy is blown, your politics stink and you haven’t a hope in hell of making it in today’s world ...”