“... doubtless for more sinning, but seeing the remarkable change wrought in her by God had adopted the Lord himself. And life was good. They lived, I had to concede, in what seemed very like paradise: Silvie, her husband, their four children, their blind dog, on their beautiful deer farm, with intensely green rolling hills on which deer grazed next to a swathe of ...”

“... is this more fundamental charge of duplicity that Cook feels demands closer investigation. Perhaps Lord Butler may yet resolve such issues, but the signs are hardly promising. No doubt most people will read Point of Departure to learn about the run up to war, but it is the sorry tale of Cook’s ministerial frustrations as leader of the House, particularly ...”

“... a large tepee as a place to sleep. I liked the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist. However, everything at Summerhill – where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws – is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for the summer of 1993 I ...”

“... part of the new DIY fad (it developed into a chapter in Theatres of Memory). Had I ever been to home improvement superstores like B&Q? (I had.) Did they sell new cornices and dado rails or fake wrought iron? (They did.) Could we meet to talk about it? We talked, we courted and were married within a year. Meeting Raphael’s family, I was once more swept off ...”

“... following ocean paths otherwise traced only by the wind. He was so persuasive that when I got home from the party I ordered a compass for my own bike. With it, I imagined, I too would become an urban navigator, unbound by convention or app. Instead, I got lost. Repeatedly and hopelessly lost. My compass directed me into cul-de-sacs and down dead ends; it ...”

“... clown in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), but the much more complicated character who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the ...”

“... win a Westminster seat at the next election, lies nicely along the axis of his commute between his home in South London and his office at the European Parliament in Brussels. If Kent, cartographically speaking, is England’s right foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe, pointing east into the sea towards Belgium. It hasn’t been an actual island since the ...”

“... have been known to question the wonders of the BBC Golden Age, noting that, despite Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, a lot of the Wednesday Plays and Plays for Today won tiny audiences then and would look embarrassingly crude today. Those who believe that all drama aspires to the condition of the single play should note that, by the early 1980s, the ...”

“... Martial offence. He was 22 years old, and it has been five years since he has seen Christmas at home … Thinks Nazism would never work in this country, because people prize their individual liberty too highly, whereas they don’t in Germany. He seemed quite intelligent. Now, there’s a job I’d really like to have – re-educating German prisoners of ...”

“... not even noticed and quick as a fish he had darted away leaving Geoffrey to eat alone and return home disconsolate, where Clive duly came by to give an account of his afternoon. True, Clive was not choosy or how else would he have got into bed with Geoffrey himself, episodes so decorous that for Clive they can scarcely have registered as sex at all, though ...”

“... legs’ are ‘pied with water-drops’ from ‘waste-ground’ to ‘the carpets of my home’. Pieings and peeings, spatterings and messings acquire a weird power. In ‘The Secretary’, the speaker, ‘Pantless, under a slim formal skirt’, tells how ‘beard-rash twinkles on my thighs’ and watches a man’s teeth, their defiled whiteness ...”

“... when, in the middle of life’s path, the poet loses his way is not unrelated to his loss of his home, of Florence. So hell presents itself first and foremost as a place of exile. To an extraordinary degree death is annulled, in the sense that the dead are to be considered dead only insofar as they are not among the living. Otherwise, however awful their ...”

“... literate people would have had only a general idea that the Odyssey was about a magical journey home and that the Iliad was about war. The few who actually read Homer at this time tended to read Latin translations, such as those by Eobanus Hessus and Lorenzo Valla. These translations made Homer look familiar. They often quoted or adapted lines from Virgil ...”

“... the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know Casement’s handwriting. Collins did. He said it was his. The diary was in two parts – bound volumes – repeating ad nauseam details of sex perversion – of the personal appearance and beauty of native boys ...”

“... eventually led to Swinton’s proposal coming to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Which is how, in January 1915, the future tank became a naval project. Swinton did not learn of this development until late in May, but Churchill had made considerable progress in the meantime. A new Landships Committee was to be chaired by ...”