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“... grace. Let us also hope that he does not vote for the Democratic Unionist Party. She was born Iris Collins in 1949. Her mother was called Mary and her father was called Joseph. He was a demobbed soldier who died, just before her sixth birthday, of a chronic illness contracted on active service in the Far East. Iris, who ...”

“... tradition as it continued, albeit in diluted form, in the panegyrics of liberty by Akenside, Collins, Thomson and others. He includes Gray’s Elegy because of its compassion for the poor, but one might expect a radical poet to be a bit less dismayed at the fact that Cromwell was born. Paulin is more at home in the Romantic period: a particular interest ...”

“... He duly proposed to her in Heal’s, and she turned him down. It was, he later admitted, his ‘Mr Collins moment’. Failing to realise how much of their relationship had been in his own head, he assumed, in defiance of Helen’s forthright character, that this was mere maiden modesty. In fact it was she who thought him less than serious, this ...”

“... of a cupboard, hidden beneath her rain cape. This tiny jolt of drama, a moment almost of Wilkie Collins plotting, doesn’t seem extravagant as a long-service award offered – in lieu of a gold watch – to the reader just reaching the 550-page mark, and perhaps considering retirement. It’s another century, and another hundred pages, before this plot ...”