Top Highlights

• It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
• These are the sorts of things that fill our lives and thoughts, and yet we treat them as incidental and hardly worthy of serious consideration.
• So I thought it might be interesting, for the length of a book, to consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important, too. Looking around my house, I was startled and a little appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, pla...
• Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
• We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives – to being clean, warm and well fed – that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, it took us for ever to achieve these things, and then they mostly came in a rush.