“... life to come in the English countryside, her formal enrolment in the world of the squirearchy, the hunt-to-hunt, the point-to-point, the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this ...”

“... venomous and virulent, as well as being frequently obscene and licentious. The reigns of William III and Queen Anne were marked by intense political partisanship, and the language used in attacks on government and parliament provoked retaliation. The Stamp Duty Act of that year caused Swift to lament ‘that all Grub Street is ruined.’ This was an ...”

“... a kind of wilful but malleable presence in the background of the political process, riding out to hunt or joust while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory accounts of diplomats, who always believe they are closer to the workings of power than they really are – has been vigorously ...”

“... hear his voice on the soundtrack telling the story. Joe Pesci’s voice we must be hearing, like William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard, through special communication arrangements made with another kind of underworld. De Niro appears again in Heat, looking the same, talking tough, but mainly not talking much, and his suits are not nearly so flashy. This time ...”

“... act of sacrifice saved neither himself nor his children from persecution and discrimination. William Hinton’s Shenfan continues his remarkable account of a Chinese village, Long Bow, in Shansi Province, which he began in Fanshen, where he covered the period of the land reform movement. A practical agriculturalist and academic, Hinton had spent five ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”

“... Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered everything from a flea circus to a waxworks display under one roof. Books had their place along ...”

“... myth and nightmare – malevolent elves and fairies, wodewoses, and followers of the fearful Wild Hunt. To read Shakespeare properly, Barton makes us see, we need to reinhabit the forests of his imagination, to repopulate them with the fancies, wonders and terrors that made them such a powerful poetic resource. To take refuge in the forest, outside the ...”

“... Modern classicists have tended to focus on the Amazons in myth, as the subtitle of a 1984 book by William Blake Tyrrell – Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking – attests. But the balance had begun to swing back towards ethnography before Tyrrell’s work appeared. In the 1960s, archaeologists excavating the many kurgans, or burial mounds, that dot the ...”

“... joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth.’‘I’m sorry: the twelfth ...”

“... Milk. The authenticity of Florence’s spiritual powers was vouched for by a Victorian scientist, William Crookes, who also became besotted with ‘Katie King’, the spirit whose materialisations were the high point of Florence Cook’s séances. There was no middle ground in the 19th-century Spiritualist debate. Either the voice you heard and the form you ...”

“... mood for what’s to come, not the stuff about the late-night tattoo sessions and the three-week hunt for Mr Hashish, the Afghan border guard who stole your US Army fatigue jacket with the ‘vitamins’ sewn into the lining. Those stories are probably best kept under wraps, at least until you die, or until I can use them to fulfil the ransom demands when ...”

“... worth laying down one’s life for two brothers or four cousins. This insight was formalised by William Hamilton in Oxford in the Sixties under the name of ‘kin selection’. If seemingly self-sacrificial behaviour disproportionately benefits one’s genetic kin, it once again becomes worthwhile in narrow genetic terms. In Wilson’s hands, Hamilton’s ...”

“... the Greeks? Aristotle said the ictis dined on honey, so Buffon asked Le Roy, the inspector of the hunt at Versailles, to experiment on the King’s ferrets; no, they did not like honey, and an ermine that Buffon fed a honey diet soon went the way of the swallows. It was the armadillo that epitomised Buffon’s difficulty with classification. Armadillos are ...”

“... wall paintings from the catacombs along with much later paintings, not only Zurburán but Holman Hunt. Roman coins are placed in the same tradition, the same gallery, as Philip Webb’s beautiful William Morris-inspired Cross of 1897. Other sections on ‘The Dual Nature’ and ‘The True Likeness’ offer similar ...”