“... Havana); his predecessor, Pat Rabbitte; several prominent trade unionists; the historian Paul (now Lord) Bew; and many writers and journalists, including Ronan Bennett and sometime Ireland correspondents of the Guardian and the Sunday Times. It would be hard to spend even a day in Ireland reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching television ...”

“... de Navarre, later Henri IV, to abjure his controversial Calvinist faith, the French court was home to a series of extraordinarily influential women. As Kathleen Wellman shows in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, these royal wives and favourites made much of their proximity to the crown, exerting their influence in diverse and far-reaching ...”

“... these accusations’ and ‘The king forgives the fox everything, and makes him the most powerful lord in all his territory’. These chapters are subdivided into sections with headings like ‘In a very tight corner, Reynard the fox not only escapes hanging, but turns the tables on all his enemies’. There’s no suspense: we know from the start that ...”

“... forms of landscape mooning alive in his colour and space. One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti strain of Pre-Raphaelitism; and this helped me understand why so much from the past of the landscape tradition that might have helped him – been adaptable to ...”

“... of the year’s most notable debutantes, she is being forced to marry – wait for it – a bore, Lord Rufus Ponsonby, who is not just an earl but ‘an earl of the realm’. After that we get a bit of backstory, all about Lady Margaret being best pals with Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter and an abject little snob, plus several pages about ...”

“... feel that something human, or once human, is stalking them. Relationships in the group fall apart; Lord of the Flies is referenced and hopes of a rescue fade. But the last voice in the book, Nina’s comes from a place of safety:I’d always wondered how Virginia Woolf could be so flippant about the 1918 Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke ...”

“... imagination, and Jerusalem as a heavenly city. He proclaimed that the task of the church at home was to help modern Britons towards a better realisation of the shining city on the hill in their daily lives. As the historian Eitan Bar-Yosef has shown, few Victorians thought it necessary to visit Palestine for the sake of their spirituality. They had no ...”

“... town, or at smart country-house weekends, while the nervously delicate Molly sat resentfully at home. She had a hearing ailment, too, which got worse: ‘the deaf wife of someone who thrived on conversation and theatre-going’. Clever Hearts is an intelligent and sympathetic account of the marriage, co-written by the MacCarthys’ grandson and his ...”

“... to Labour – he had no interest in private luxury. Upper-class socialists like Hugh Dalton and Lord Longford occasionally alarmed him by raising the spectre of republicanism, but he found Attlee – once he had got used to him – greatly reassuring. In truth, no such nonsense ever stood a chance. King George and Queen Elizabeth were – deservedly – too ...”

“... house where in due time and after prolonged chanting on his part, a great star appeared and the Lord Maitreya came to him in splendour. And then Rosalid’s face shone with divine ecstasy (I quote Nitya) and she cried out repeatedly: ‘Do you see Him? Do you see Him? According to Nitya, Rosalind was the only one who actually did. Nitya’s beautiful story ...”

“... Indeed, ‘the pencil in our hand can be the automobile in our garage, the television in our home, the clothes, on our back.’ These are bold claims, given that technology is concerned with power as well as with design and function, and given that pencils, unlike steam engines or word-processors, depend mainly on human power for their use. Petroski, a ...”

“... the island: but this did not indicate that no one other than Lizzie could have been in the Borden home that morning. Taking up the analogy, the defence might even have pointed out that Crusoe’s own inference was scarcely watertight: suppose he had taken off his shoes the previous day to paddle and forgotten all about it? It is certainly striking, as ...”

“... takes a simple, or simple-minded, and by our standards barbaric view of the proceedings: the Lord was testing Abraham, who proved his obedience – that he feared God – by being prepared to sacrifice Isaac. It might appear that God here fails two tests – goodness and omniscience; but then, he moves in a mysterious way.) The most appealing voice in ...”

“... boarding-school, the boy had virtually no education; his mother preferred to keep him at home to go window-shopping with her, or to the cinema. These were the days of the double-feature, and he saw, he estimates, two hundred films a year. He had a crowd of relatives who are, in his view, spiteful, greedy, stupid and pathetic. They manifested ‘a ...”

“... stopped her: but who? She was beholden to nobody, and that was her proudest boast.’ Now, hearing home-going schoolchildren under the window she ‘squeezed her eyes shut and doubled herself over her knotted arms. It was a good sound ... but it hurt her.’ At 40 she has married ‘a kind and comical man for whom, though she was too distracted to express ...”