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“... last. He was devoted to an adoring and possessive mother; but his adoration, unlike Lawrence’s, took the sensible line of keeping away from her as much as possible, although he wrote to ‘Bessie’ assiduously every day. He saw the humour as much as the pathos in unequal relationships: young as he is, Leo is aware of his adored Marion as a comic as well as ...”

“... with the optimistic view that higher education was the locomotive of economic growth. Thatcherism took an opposite view. It saw no correlation between the production of sociology graduates at Essex and cars at Cowley. In 1981, there began to be applied the Thatcherite-Joseph doctrine of ‘strength through starvation’. Cut and freeze were applied with the ...”

“... though the Dervish forces were massacred.) Such imperial dramas – the Zulus supplied another – took hold of the public imagination back home, supplying stirring preludes to the great anti-climax of the Boer War at the century’s end. Memories and legends were still potent when A.E.W. Mason wrote The Four Feathers, made into one of the first Korda colour ...”

“... as he saw them, that science offered. His response to Bergson’s half-hour peroration took less than a minute. Its pivotal declaration was: ‘Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes’ – ‘The time of the philosophers does not exist.’ What Einstein said next was even more controversial: ‘There remains only a psychological time that ...”

“... they’re going to have trouble repaying their debts – debts which, to a large extent, they took over from the global banking system, to keep it solvent. As I argued when writing about the Greek crisis (LRB, 14 July), this is a huge problem for the eurozone in particular. The euro story has continued to evolve in the direction it was always likely to ...”

“... between blocks. I ask a group of boys playing football whether they can show me where the murder took place. Their spokesman is courteous and takes time to point out where I can find Hordle Promenade. When I ask him to clarify his directions he does so and then goes back to his game. It is now just before four o’clock. I stop and speak briefly to several ...”

“... of others, particularly Edith’s. Not only was Robert Bulwer-Lytton a philanderer who publicly took up with an American actress but he messed up his financial affairs and left his wife with inadequate funds for the upkeep of Knebworth House, the family estate, after his death. From 1901, she and Edith lived together at Homewood, a draughty house far more ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... thinking that something really foreign was happening on one of these family holidays was when we took shelter in a little café-cum-shop somewhere in North Wales and all the other customers were talking in a language I couldn’t understand. Although quite gratified in retrospect by this evidence of authentically local culture, my parents were clearly made ...”

“... shut behind her. Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John, who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view. In John’s unfinished mural Lyric Fantasy, painted soon after her death, Ida stands to one side of the group of women and children who make ...”

“... Straying Student’, to a knottier and more derisive manifestation of the same drive (though it took him 17 years to get together a volume of poetry in the new mode – Ancient Lights came out in 1955, while 1938 was the date of its predecessor Night and Morning). Social criticism: this is one of the two major preoccupations of Irish writers in the 20th ...”

“... If they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings ...”

“... produced a very good sub-Dada movie, entitled Groundhog Day, and starring Bill Murray, which took the piss out of the repetitious and the banal by capturing the star in a time-warp where he was doomed to enact the same day over and over again until he could learn to act his way out of it. Other smart films have been made on dumb subjects, or about ...”

“... his own intellectual needs in mind. Like many heavy readers he loved detective stories, but he took them seriously, prefixing to his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ a heavy Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few ...”

“... I felt in those days during the opening scene of Official Secrets, which stars Keira Knightley. (I took a perverse liking to her when it was unfashionable to, around the time of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie; and I have somehow ended up as a true fan, an opening weekend Keira completist.) The movie starts in February 2003, with Keira as the once and ...”