“... 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 ...”

“... nothing to what they would suffer in the hereafter. London apprentices were ordered to stay at home. Victims were sent ‘into odde corners into the countrey’, in order to get them out of the capital, where Protestant ideas had a firmer hold. Sometimes the heresy-hunters, out of pity or fear of local reprisals, seem almost to have conspired with ...”

“... and blues that only exaggerated the outdated sound of the material.’ If Redding had gone home then – if Stewart had cancelled the session – that might been the whole story. Instead, in Gould’s telling: Steve Cropper sat down at the piano, an instrument he could barely play. When he asked Otis what key he wanted to sing in, Otis said it didn’t ...”

“... Afront page story​ for the Sunday Pictorial in February 1938 was headlined: ‘“Ghost” Wrecks Home. Family Terrorised.’ A recent series in the Sunday Pic, as it was known, had invited readers to share their supernatural experiences. Almost a thousand of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said ...”

“... called themselves ‘the godly’ or ‘the true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book ...”

“... and two files of musketeers tramp into the House. While they are taking up their positions, the Lord General is still stumping up and down, abusing MPs who catch his eye. ‘You, sir, are a drunkard, and some of you are whoremasters’ (he’s looking at Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth). Then he points to the Speaker up in his chair: ‘Fetch him ...”

“... Lincoln: that would change everything. But Lincoln knew how politically divisive it would be at home to turn the war into an abolitionist cause. As the Economist observed, with only some hyperbole, ‘the great majority of the people in the Northern states detest the coloured population even more than do the Southern whites.’ In October 1861, when General ...”

“... situation of the American colonies, they were going to choose them whether George III and Lord North liked it or not. There was no point in arguing with that political fact: ‘I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.’ Burke’s opposition to the American war has a further dimension which comes close to a blanket ...”

“... largely unchallenged. Then, quite suddenly, things began to change. In 1772, the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, issued the famous Somerset Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the ...”

“... good enough to die in’. She does this by concentrating, like Laetitia Pilkington, on Swift ‘at home’. This is Swift in his country parish, Laracor in County Meath, cutting and planting his willows: ‘cultivating half an acre of Irish bog’, he said when writing to a friend in England, but Glendinning makes it sound as though he relished his ...”

“... press will describe it as an impenetrable nether region of ancient hatreds; the next it will be home to swinging multi-cultural Sarajevo at the heart of Europe. In one sense, the Prime Minister is right: Kosovo is on the doorstep. Europe will never allow it in. The West’s determination to keep most of the Albanian refugees in miserable conditions in ...”

“... taking friends on cruises in the Mediterranean and along the coast of Italy, and, on the return home, to steam out to pick his party up when the White Star liner reached New York Harbor. Morgan’s character as a deal-maker is apparent in non-business as well as business transactions. Among the more amusing episodes in the biography is Strouse’s account ...”

“... and nervous ghost’, with a nice husband who said: ‘ “We daren’t leave Mrs Carr at home because she is so mischievous – so we have to take her with us.” But he got her in the drawing-room and took her hand gently when no one was looking.’ He had as keen an eye for a ceremony as Edward VII had for decorations. Anyone who has ever organised ...”

“... would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to Poplar. They piled into the nearest boozer and pitched back the doubles until they could lift a shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel haunts Kray foot-soldier Tony Lambrianou like a psychogeographical nightmare. The ...”