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“... Irving were both actors (the former was a playwright as well). Terry’s daughter, Edith (Edy) Craig, had a career as a designer, director and producer of feminist plays; her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, acted with Irving, but became disillusioned with the English theatre and, like other maverick theatre visionaries ...”

“... Even for Gladstone’s Liberal colleagues (though not for him), and for Elizabeth I or Lloyd George, they were a costly and debilitating diversion from more important matters. But except in the late 18th century, Ireland denied its administrators, even full-time, well-meaning ones, the illusion that overrule would be acceptable if only it provided ...”

“... to her excellent – indeed seminal and unprecedented – anthology of Ulster prose,* Patricia Craig remarks that for her collection Northern Ireland is to be regarded as ‘a geographical rather than a political entity; it consists of seven counties, not the partitioned six or the historic nine. Donegal seems to be inescapably part of the ...”

“... deal of medium. In the hands of brilliant performers such as Christopher Reid, John Fuller or Craig Raine, the results can be extremely variegated and highly satisfying. It is of course misleading to put such names together – they are as different from each other as from any other poets writing today – and yet there is a recognisable similarity in ...”

“... was one of the cases that proved to be the undoing of the well-known alienist and self-publicist George Man Burrows (who had quite a stock of delusions of his own, among them that he could smell madness and detect a ‘maniacal odour’). He was given a keelhauling in the press for his arrogance and disregard for the liberty of the subject, and the term ...”

“... of his life, his surroundings improved – less of Noel Coward’s chic, as it were, and more of George Devine’s scruff. The glamorous world at which he had originally aimed didn’t really suit him anyway. When he has supper with Winston Churchill, the occasion is one of Pooterish maladroitness: As we three turned to seat ourselves again, I fancied I ...”

“... a peculiarly heart-sore quality. We call our migrations ‘exile’ (a chapter-heading in George Marshall’s lucid and thorough study of Edwin Muir’s native culture), although the individual choice is usually our own. As Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters, ‘I do not know if I desire to live there, but let me hear in some far land a ...”

“... About​ two thirds of the way into Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is tied to a chair in the desert crater headquarters of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s grimacing and an uncontained scream ...”

“... or those who walk for the sake of the experience. Wordsworth and Coleridge did this, and so did George Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath ...”

“... to the future. We knew this was happening, too. We just didn’t want to believe pollster George Gallup’s 1968 statistics that found the political views of voters between the ages of 21 and 29 no different from the views of those aged 30 to 49. ‘A lot of this talk about this group’s being a maverick generation must be considered ...”

“... of the North Country has encouraged an utter lack of neurological activity. The warrior General George Armstrong Custer, a florid diarist before Crazy Horse cut short his writing career, was perhaps the first disowned American hero to find this out, on the rolling slopes of the Little Big Horn. Ernest Hemingway abandoned Africa to scatter his fame across ...”

“... MAN: It’s hard to imagine you with tired eyes, mademoiselle. Perhaps you don’t know, but you have very beautiful eyes. GIRL: They will be beautiful, monsieur, when the time comes … I’ll put up with whatever is necessary. And after my eyes have been beautiful, they’ll grow dim, as everyone else’s do. The French​ originals of these lines went out on Paris National Radio on 12 January 1957 in a broadcast of Le Square, adapted by Marguerite Duras from her novel of the same name ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”

“... like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means ...”

“... but if the cards fell in the right way, it wouldn’t be a Buick you were driving but a Bentley. Craig Venter’s career – he was born in 1946 – tracks these historical changes. The route he followed to a scientific vocation was as personally circuitous as it was structurally perspicuous. An adolescent bored with school, he muddled part of the way ...”