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“... in March 1962, hoping to be warmly welcomed to Austenland and live among Lizzy Bennets and Anne Elliots. Dashing out on deck as the ship approached harbour, she found that it was cold, grey and wet: ‘It felt like walking into the inside of a grave.’Her landfall did come to seem like a death of sorts, at the very least of her illusions about life in ...”

“... States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is ...”

“... to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest another, less respectable side to him. Just a few ...”

“... in silent rage. It is clear from Dido Merwin’s account in an appendix to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Plath, that she could be intensely demanding and jealous. And in a letter to his brother after the break-up of the marriage in 1962, Hughes refers to ‘Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality’, before saying that they are now ...”

“... airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes: انجيلينا   Angelina بانانا   Banana تيتيكاكا   Titicaca ‘All the travellers’ books, to their great consternation, are intruded upon by the Arabic ...”

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an extension of the Hegelian doctrine that the owl of Minerva takes her flight only when the shades of night ...”

“... also what is billed in the programme as a ‘Special Guest’. This turns out to be Gordon Brown, who makes a decent speech too and one which, as R. says, must be impromptu as he repeats himself. Flattered to be gathered up by Neil and taken in past the explanatory displays (‘You don’t want all this foreplay, do you?’) to the figures ...”

“... Jesse Florian in Farewell, My Lovely, who ‘had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blonde, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely ...”

“... in the Mill on the Floss (Chap. VIII) “Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.”’ Another is treated with more formality – ‘Thank you again, dear Professor Adorno, for your friendship and for your belief in my work’ – and mocked gently behind his ...”

“... Gothic buttresses to the back range. A floor divides the hall into two storeys and a homely Queen Anne front with apricot stucco and dark green-blue paint looks out on the lawns and shrubberies. I lost my heart to this history-stored house and long to know the succession of its owners ... From Wilcotes we descended to Finstock, which begins at the bottom of ...”

“... Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control measures. ‘We must have population control ...”

“... And with the cinema too music is often the most powerful stimulant: I watched The Diary of Anne Frank for a time without tears until the arrival of some soupy music left me with two sodden handkerchiefs. So I am manifestly one of a host in whom tears are a cheap commodity. It always surprises me, therefore, when intelligent people talk with ...”

“... War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of solidarity ...”

“... her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride ...”