“... From 1963, when the Engineering Building was completed, every alert architect or student, from home or abroad, took the train or headed up Ernest Marples’s empty new M1 to see what had happened in Leicester. Following the, by then, well-worn pilgrimage route in the early 1970s, I can remember the electrifying effect of the building, even on the dingiest ...”

“... on US territory. Diplomatic representations culminated in an exchange of letters between Lord Ashburton, special minister for the negotiations, and Daniel Webster, the US Secretary of State. They agreed that such raids could be justified only if there was a ‘necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment ...”

“... the first flying bomb landed on London. None of the characters in Unexploded is bombed out of a home, which makes a passage like this one seem oddly abstract: ‘Imagine it. You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast. The walls of your house are sucked in – a full ten inches – before they are pushed back out by a blast wind that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with one gun now doing the killing work of 100 riflemen, he argued, the other 99 could go home, and live in peace. (There must be a flaw there somewhere.) And then there was the argument that you get with every radically new weapon: ‘With a few hundred Gatlings on both sides,’ the Indianapolis Sentinel claimed around 1880, ‘armies would melt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... together. Winston’s wife Clementine was a very good player, too – when she could get away from home for long enough to show it. She met Lindemann in mixed doubles at Eaton Hall in the summer of 1921, and rather took to him. At the same time, the duke came to suspect that Lindemann and Churchill would get on well together, had them both to dinner, and was ...”

“... away with weariness for a lover who may never come, is rebuked. She might have looked closer to home for relief. To abandon oneself to what is ‘elsewhere’, rather than to devote one’s attention to the birds of the house, is to invite fatal disappointment, visited on her by the unforgiving ‘amorini, who,/being unreal, demand/her head for what they ...”

“... life than we were; but it would be useful to look – as Bridge does not – at some of the parts Lord Nolan’s reforms have not reached. Some minor scams which escaped Nolan, such as the merchandising of MPs’ addresses (for a sizable fee MPs gave as their home address the office of a lobbying organisation, to which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ruined with a bastard child.’ Places reappear. Amma and her friend Sylvester are entirely at home in the bar of the Ritzy cinema in Brixton in 2019, ‘surrounded by posters of the independent films they’d been going to see together since they first met’. Carole’s mother, Bummi, invited to a ‘Ghanaian fusion music night’ at the Ritzy a few ...”

“... of George III. In the course of his researches on certain ‘confidential letters’ written by Lord Bute in the early 1760s, Bottwink also manages to solve a murder. However, far from being the novel’s hero, the Namier figure is, in accordance with the reputation of his original, a crashing bore, dominating the breakfast table with the minutiae of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but not personally an arch-enemy of Elizabeth.) Kelley was also receiving regular letters from Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief adviser, begging him to return home ‘to honour Her Majesty … with the fruits of such great knowledge as God hath given him’. Or if he could not personally return, perhaps he might send ...”