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“... the trial transcripts with the frequency of a refrain. The country was transfixed: Pat Barker’s William Rivers notes that consideration of the awful events in France was ‘pushed into second place by the orgy of irrational prejudice that was taking place at the Old Bailey’. And for the litigants it was all for nothing. Billing was found not guilty. He ...”

“... of ‘nova’. Suddenly she seemed to have read a lot of books. She refers to Joseph Conrad, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Morvern’s palette has expanded to encompass the Updikean spectrum of emerald, cyan and tangerine. She uses the word ‘whorls’. That this was Alan Warner’s voice rather than Morvern ...”

“... Brendan; the later expeditions of Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson (who became a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The ...”

“... In America, William Maxwell is something of a Grand Old Man. He has been president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has won the American Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. For forty years, as a fiction editor on the New Yorker, he advised and goaded Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and John Updike ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs ...”

“... William Fiennes has a deep-seated sense of home and what it means to be distant from it. Birth-house, parents, migrant birds: these fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May ...”

“... William Blake’s Proverb of Hell, ‘Sooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse unacted desires,’ appears unexpectedly as a chapter epigraph in this autobiography by the once-notorious ‘Bomber Baronet’ of the headlines, Ranulph Fiennes. It is probably as good an excuse as any for indulging a compulsion to circle the globe by way of both Poles, a feat which Fiennes accomplished with the blessing of the Heir to the Throne and many hundreds of sponsors ...”

“... understand why he is so sad but the film all too insistently offers a complete explanation. Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio shows us why the Christians in this play are, on the whole, such an unlikeable lot. Lynn Collins as Portia looks as good as she ought to, and redeems some tiresome moments in the early scenes by being startlingly good and grave in the trial ...”

“... first date, they haven’t kissed yet and they don’t have the exchange about the meat. Ralph Fiennes, looking bored over their steak and onions, says to Julianne Moore: ‘I’m in love, you know.’ She, equally wooden, tells him that she is, too. (Moore, who can be very good, seems to be concentrating so hard on her accent that she forgets to do any ...”

“... his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should not exaggerate ...”

“... many of them based on Pliny, Aristotle and others. ‘Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century and William Cobbett in the early 19th, both of them acute observers, held the Classical writers responsible for the bulk of English rural superstitions.’ Nor was the attack on ‘vulgar errors’ a new one, a new battle of world views in the 16th and 17th ...”

“... committee of aunts’. There was no shortage of cousins, Irish and English. One of them, Audrey Fiennes, became her lifelong friend and confidante.Bowen was later to recall that transplantation to England at an early and impressionable age established a ‘cleft’ in her between ‘heredity’ and ‘environment’. Heredity she continued to acknowledge as ...”

“... and before those still lodging in the rectory were dispersed, I visited the house by invitation of William Bock, who acted as spokesperson for the collective. Will, as might have been expected under the circumstances, looked pale, convalescent, chilled. He hugged himself under a poncho of blankets, drawing up his legs on the sofa, before he launched into his ...”