“... Sylvia Beach said that Americans came to the Left Bank for two things they couldn’t get at home, alcohol and Ulysses, but they also came for the cafés, the galleries, the nightlife. Butch women could be found dancing and drinking at Le Monocle at a time when dressing in men’s clothing was technically a crime – in photographs taken by Brassaï they ...”

“... final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and most lavish display of hospitality in 1575. Among ...”

“... muck (it looks like a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on ...”

“... opened fire at several buses – some full of students, one carrying football players coming home from a match. Six people were killed. By midnight, 43 more students had disappeared, or, rather, had been forcibly disappeared. That’s where the story fades to grey. The Mexican government at first claimed that the police had handed the students over to a ...”

“... extent she was playing a part in her books. But it’s also clear, reading them, that she was at home in theatres, where several of her books are set. It’s obvious, too, that she idealised a kind of Englishness, and that her own writing was stimulated by English contemporaries like Sayers and Christie.Marsh named her detective, Roderick Alleyn, after the ...”

“... service. Marriage usually meant children and domestic duties. Pym settled back into her parents’ home in Oswestry, the country town in Shropshire where her father was a solicitor and her mother an assistant church organist. She bought a typewriter and started another high-spirited comedy, Crampton Hodnet, set among scholars, spinsters and clergy. The agent ...”

“... at which grace, delivered by the senior man present, sometimes lasts a long, long time: ‘O Lord, we want to thank you for this wonderful weather we’ve been having ... temperature up in the nineties and looks like staying that way ... for the good cooking of Shirleen here and Mary Belle ... for bringing into our lives our guest this day, John Rayburn ...”

“... sister is a heartless Goneril. An emotional entanglement leaves her ‘exactly in the condition of Lord Hardy and Lady Charlotte in The Funeral’ (by Steele). Her rift with the theatre manager Fleetwood is glossed over with a quote from Peachum. Even in moments of trauma, her sense of theatre is uppermost. Returning ...”

“... was always thought to be her aim when she appeared strong. If both super-powers withdrew to their home territory, Russia would remain in Europe and the US would not. What is being sought now is not some incremental advance in arms control but nothing less than a peace settlement that will supply the framework for international relations within Europe for the ...”

“... and financiers’, but even ‘the standard works of reputable men, even men of high degree, like Lord Bryce, who went there to learn, or M. Clemenceau, who went there to lecture, not to mention the lesser fry of honest journalists and bona fide travellers. All alike seem to revel in compiling soporific statistics of marketable products, in recording the ...”

“... on an alien encampment and, as law-abiding Americans will, blast everything in sight. They go home to their fortress apartments in Coldharbor Tower (the name is one of Theroux’s little in-jokes about his beloved Brixton). But inexorably they are drawn back for their own reasons to the forbidden territory. One has fallen in love with an alien girl whom ...”

“... an absolute monarch. He was described as a priest-king, a second Melchisedech, or even as ‘Our Lord’. Other rituals, however, introduced the theme of humility: the Pope as servant of the servants of God, walking barefoot in procession or washing the feet of ordinary people on Maundy Thursday. Krautheimer has little to say about ritual itself, but he is ...”

“... was standing in the cathedral: ‘on the very spot where rather more than five years subsequently Lord Nelson was buried – a spot from which we saw, pompously floating to and fro in the upper spaces of the great aisle running westward from ourselves, many flags captured from France, Spain and Holland ... these solemn trophies of chance and change amongst ...”

“... driving force of her narrative. In her long list of star-spangled acknowledgments (Prince Philip, Lord Carrington ...) she apologises to du Maurier’s children for exposing ‘events in their mother’s life which were unknown to them and which have proved painful for them to discover’. The apology is seemly, but she must have had qualms when explaining ...”

“... as double-edged as it was backhanded. ‘I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes,’ he prefaced a long quotation from the passage above; but Keynes had ‘never said a truer thing’. Here is the theme of Richard Cockett’s study, Thinking the Unthinkable, which has seized on a superb subject. Using archival and oral sources to ...”