“... when people are handling euro coins and notes will they understand that the Union is more than white nights of herring quotas and Danish apples. Money, for Schopenhauer, was ‘an inexhaustible Proteus’ ever ready to be transformed into our newest and most pressing object of desire. In Spain and Portugal, the euro is somehow the guarantee that there will ...”

“... hoping to find a house where she could spend the winter (their difficult stay is recounted by Richard Murphy in his autobiography The Kick). Hughes’s letters appear cheerful and engaged and free of guilt. At this time, curiously, he concocts a plan to send poems out under one or two pseudonyms. He wants to invent a rival poet, ‘or perhaps two’, who ...”

“... interests of our House I was sacrificed’. Soon after the treaty was signed, Charles II wrote to Richard Fanshawe, soon to be his ambassador in Lisbon: ‘One of the principal advantages we propose to ourself by this entire conjunction with Portugal is the advancement of the trade of this nation and the enlargement of our own territories and ...”

“... Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of the mortuary chamber, garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick alongside wreaths from her children and ...”

“... snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of the photos ...”

“... of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 Teignmouth Road, NW2, built around 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between ...”

“... a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its ...”

“... or silence. What is life worth if the table is too bare to feed strangers, or if the wall is blank white with no blaze of mad political posters and graffiti, or if women don’t push away their empty plates and start singing, or if the world stops talking about Georgia? But this time is anything but empty. For one thing, the lights are on in Tbilisi and the ...”

“... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”

“... year, Bogdanos pursued another inveterate and controversial collector, the philanthropist Shelby White, who had sat on the board of the Met for 33 years and populated the museum’s collections with her loans. Attorneys showed up at her apartment at 6 a.m. and carted away dozens of presumably looted antiquities.When Bogdanos’s investigators looked into the ...”

“... lives and choices no other generation has ever had. I wonder why. I’m speaking, of course, of a white, Western cohort which the generations on either side quite rightly resent. What the hell did we do to deserve to have it so easy? Nothing. On one side the 20th-century wars, then in gratitude free education, housing, a long state-funded playtime that went ...”

“... Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence up your arse.’ Expensive cars disgorged burly men from Ayrshire and Fife. A Rangers banner was attached to the metal railings in front of the cenotaph. Sections of the crowd chanted ‘Rule Britannia’ and ...”

“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the ...”