“... about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text was issued in February as a Faber paperback original, uniform with the ...”

“... have sometimes seen as the Dutch ‘economic miracle’ of the 17th century; and the place of the home and the family in Dutch culture. In order to make the description more vivid and concrete, each of the themes is represented by or embodied in more precise case-studies which concentrate on the material culture of the Republic. Schama’s concern with ...”

“... the Skies,   Awake my dreadful Sword; Awake my Wrath, and Smite the Man   My fellow, saith the Lord. Davie asks: ‘Is this ferocious emendation in the direction of greater simplicity? I think we have to say it is, that the second version seals off any loopholes by which to evade the fearsomeness of what Watts is saying.’ Davie is fond of ferocity, and ...”

“... Runner-up – hubris: ‘The Greeks have a word for it,’ we were repeatedly told. Jock (now Lord) Bruce-Gardyne, former Economic Secretary to the Treasury, managed to combine at least two of these factors in an article in the Times, ‘Hounded out by Hypocrisy’, the day after Mr Parkinson’s resignation. ‘So that great British ...”

“... New Testament ‘has gone quite well’. It will ‘soon be out’. Sir Roger Mynors is fully at home with Erasmus’s Latin, just as Professor Bietenholz is on top of Erasmus scholarship. These are excellent volumes, beautifully printed, tastefully illustrated, helpfully edited. It would have been useful if departures from Allen (especially corrections of ...”

“... to Algeria, then to Germany, then to West Point, to Washington, and then at last to their various home towns; most American newspapers and national weeklies ran supplements on the return, ranging from learned analyses of how the final agreement between Iran and the United States was arrived at, and what it involved, to celebrations of American heroism and ...”

“... the disagreeable sides of Waugh is shown in a letter of 1958 to his son Auberon, who had written home from hospital to say that he had been visited by his Uncle Alec. Evelyn wrote back mocking Alec. How did Auberon know it was his uncle? Was it not an impostor? ‘Did he wear a little silk scarf round his neck? Was he tipsy? These are the tests.’ Evelyn ...”

“... a lot of time worrying whether she wouldn’t have more fun with someone else, with Rosamund or Lord Lascelles, or ‘in a tower with my books’. Mrs Glendinning, always mindful of the possibility that readers may find Vita ‘unlikeable’ – she has some difficulty later on with her snobbery and her anti-semitism – at this point nods wisely and ...”

“... later prime minister A.J. Balfour – had both left the Liberal Party over its embrace of Irish Home Rule. Throughout the late Victorian period, the movement worked with parliamentary allies to introduce women’s suffrage bills on non-party lines. This seemed a sensible strategy, since supporters of suffrage were found in all parties, and sometimes the ...”

“... were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated patsy/marksman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the ...”

“... the Large White and Landrace of modern herds. Among these ‘middle-breed’ pigs we may notice Lord of the Wassail, the first middle-breed boar to take a prize at the Royal Smithfield Show. The bristles of his coat were eight and a half inches long (his breeder, a keen angler, used them to tie fishing flies) and his hide so thick it was fit only to be made ...”

“... the congregants. ‘A-men!’ they shout; ‘That’s right!’; ‘Yes, sir!’; ‘Oh, my sweet lord!’; ‘Unh-hunh!’; ‘Yeah!’; ‘It’s all right!’; ‘Hallelujah!’ The antiphonal responses allow the preacher to pause for breath and thought, and, from my one experience in the pulpit of such a church, during a mayoral election in Memphis in ...”

“... feet receded and turned into dangling limpnesses too far away to control. The teacher carried me home on her shoulders. I gripped the dinosaur in one hand. It was still wet with green and purple poster paint. After that things turned delirious. I had mumps . . . When I caught the mumps I couldn’t read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first ...”

“... A more typical female role model of the conformist period was June Allyson, pouting loyally at home while James Stewart, camped out in the Mojave Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The letterbox format was less suited to ...”

“... is nicely appropriate, for Adam Kellas and hangovers are on familiar terms. The novel begins on home turf for Meek (who reported for the Guardian from Afghanistan and Iraq), in the tribal life of journalists, hunkered down in a compound as bare of comforts as a 1950s boarding school, amid a tangle of cables plugged into the unreliable electricity ...”