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“... The​ surviving works of St Augustine run to more than five million words. To give some sense of scale, that’s roughly 10 per cent of all the Latin literature extant from before 600 AD, comfortably more than the total published output of Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope, and four times the magnitude of À la recherche du temps perdu. Between 395 and his death in 430, Augustine was bishop of Hippo, modern Annaba on the coast of Algeria ...”

“... In AD 362 – only fifty years after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity – the pagan Emperor Julian, hoping to undermine the privileged position of this new religion, banned Christian rhetoricians from teaching the pagan Classics. In a spectacular act of literary futility, the Syrian poet Apollinaris and his son, determined to retain a Classical gloss to Christian education, at once translated nearly the whole of the Bible into Greek epic verse ...”

“... Once​ upon a time – and certainly before the Roman conquest – Britain was ruled by good King Lud. According to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all the surrounding kingdoms (some far distant) could boast finer residences ...”

“... Between 1896 and 1907, the Oxford Egyptologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt spent six seasons digging the low, sandy mounds surrounding the village of el-Behnesa, a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile. In concentrating on the ancient town of Oxyrhynchos (literally, ‘city of the sharp-nosed fish’), they were not aiming to uncover another set of impressive ruins that could rival those of Leptis Magna, Ephesus or Pompeii ...”

“... divided on how to interpret the contribution of Romans and Britons to these cities. In London, Christopher Wren (whose survey of the Roman city remained unpublished until 1750) suggested that burials found during the construction of St Paul’s Cathedral belonged ‘to the Colony where Romans and Britains lived and died together’. In his History of ...”

“... Sometime​ in the late 430s, the pious nun Melania recalled a vision she and her husband had shared thirty years before in Rome when they were young and very rich: One night we went to sleep, greatly upset, and we saw ourselves, both of us, passing through a very narrow crack in the wall. We were gripped with panic by the cramped space, so that it seemed as if we were about to die ...”

“... In November​ 361, after the sudden death of the emperor Constantius II, his cousin Flavius Claudius Iulianus became the undisputed ruler of the Roman world. Twenty months later, Julian himself lay dying. In early April 363, 100,000 Roman troops had crossed the frontier and marched eastwards through Mesopotamia. The campaign was a disaster, dogged by bad luck, incompetence and a failure to appreciate either the difficulties of the terrain or the strength of the enemy ...”

“... he thought about these people. It is suggested here (and one of the editors of this translation, Christopher Kelly, has suggested elsewhere) that the conspiracy against Rousseau was deeper than a mere attempt to show that he was a monster and to cast discredit by attributing to him works he had never written or opinions he had never held. His ...”

“... Long fragments of his work survive and his tale has often been retold, but rarely as well as by Christopher Kelly here. Full of intrigue and local colour, Priscus reveals among much else the sedentary character of the fifth-century Huns, their distance from their nomadic roots, and the extent to which they had developed a sub-Roman court culture in the ...”

“... the subject of major books in Italian (Giuseppe Zecchini), French (Michel Rouche) and English (Christopher Kelly). The shadow of contemporary foreign affairs looms over all these narratives, even if Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are manifestly not Attila. Luttwak’s insistence that avoidance of battle and cash up front is ...”

“... a special class of civil servant. The chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Christopher Kelly, has recommended that no MP whose seat is within an hour’s train journey of London should be entitled to claim for a second home; that MPs will no longer be allowed to employ family members as secretaries and researchers; and that there ...”

“... in India. But even when the war begins, it is only as a pretext for bathos on a grander scale. HMS Kelly is dive-bombed and sunk off Crete, with ‘Dickie’ on the bridge. This episode, which has aroused controversy over his seamanship in its time, is given the Evangeline Pembury strong, silent treatment: ‘Dickie’s men had served with him willingly; if ...”

“... Stanton.) Most of the novel’s reviewers have acknowledged its excellence. In the New Yorker, Christopher Buckley (himself a suspect) called Primary Colors ‘an absolutely dazzling book, the best political novel in many years’. In Newsweek, Walter Shapiro found it ‘the best aide’s-eye view of politics since Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s ...”

“... Great-Aunt Jean, Cousin Jean, two small Canadian girls, their father and their mother, in a Grace Kelly hat, who broke the champagne bottle and sent the ship – splash! – into the River Carron. Then Uncle Alex took us round the miniaturised industrial world of the shipyard: the pattern-lofts, where the templates of ribs and plates were cut in plywood; the ...”

“... two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss Kelly intimates to Eilis that she knows about her secret marriage in the US, Eilis shakes with panic; in the film, taking charge, she proudly tells Miss Kelly her married name (‘Mrs Tony Fiorello’). And whereas the novel ...”