“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”