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“... Georgian and, ideally, to the Georgian of Georges IV, III and II, not to mention the Edwardian of Edward the Confessor. Steeped in the notion of things peculiarly English (and Welsh), it was a dedication more enthusiastic than reverential. Piper’s heyday coincided with that of Ealing Studios; indeed, his posters for Robert Hamer’s Pink String and Sealing ...”

“... on 6 June 1894, the elder daughter of Alice Keppel, a famously discreet mistress of the future Edward VII. ‘I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion ...”

“... the first task of an impartial biographer of Wyclif was the removal of ‘several layers of rich brown Protestant varnish’. For him, Wyclif’s uncompromising predestinarianism was ‘a grisly creed’. To read Wyclif was ‘not fun’. And he wrote of Wyclif’s ‘catastrophic incompetence as a practical reformer . . . Nothing is to be gained by ...”

“... with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century’. The pressure of this last question – or indeed of all three – is not to be collapsed into shorthand of the kind: ‘Wasn’t English landscape bound to be an exercise in ...”

“... Antoinette. (In 1795 the rhyme was altered, so Jack survived to bind his head with vinegar and brown paper.) Jack Sprat escaped his eating disorder by striking up a partnership with his wife; things worked out for Jack of beanstalk fame; even Little Jack Horner got his plum. But Polley’s Jackself defies our capacity to wrap him up. There’s nothing like ...”

“... course of warming, some of which have proved surprisingly accurate. The Jamaican plantation owner Edward Long envisaged something not unlike the American Midwest of today – an agroindustrial ecotopia where the climate would be warmed by the ‘fires and smoke of ten thousand crowded cities hereafter to be built, and by a general subjection of the soil to ...”

“... he never gave his name. The other one was an armed-struggle potter, a woman called Fiona Armour-Brown, who lived in Wales. She was slightly over the top. She believed we should be setting up small terrorist groups – that wasn’t the word used, but that’s effectively what it was – in Wales and parts of Northern England, to challenge Labour. So we ...”

“... experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early forties, but his ...”

“... in Glasgow?’ she said. ‘St Mungo’s,’ he said. She smiled at the water, green turning brown. He loved the way she spoke. It was singing. She was bold. He put his mouth in her hair and they leaned on the railings. He could see a light giving out on the mainland. A nice kisser she said. Noise coming down from the steep hotels. Let’s go back to the ...”

“... lowest ranks – the closest to peat – are lignite and sub-bituminous coal, known in Britain as brown coal. These have been estimated to make up nearly a third of proved global reserves, but are not much exploited in areas where higher-grade coal is available, because they produce a lot of smoke and relatively little heat (they are also difficult to ...”

“... of Hunt. The Irish Times.’ Lennox wearily levered his torso forward to look down at Hunty’s brown and punctured shoe tops. As slowly he lowered himself backward to look strabismally into Hunty’s boyish face. Hunty, his quarry at last in sight, could not but offer to refresh the balloon glass. On the nod he brought back two doubles, sat, notebook ...”

“... believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps) and one ...”

“... are tubs of geraniums and trellises thick with honey-suckle. He is a tall lean man whose reddish brown hair with odd threads of grey is cut into a boyish fringe. He wears tinted glasses and a tight navy shirt and trousers. He says he is a dark sort of individual … ‘very Celtic’. He looks grim and a little forbidding until he smiles. Around his neck ...”

“... a tragedy, that the objects I had enjoyed trying to identify – was this Prince Albert or a young Edward VII? – also represented something unknowably private and painful.Objects from the past, if they survive, lose and accrue meaning over time. Their original human associations and contexts, their given purposes and original attractions, dissolve and are ...”

“... we insist on its ‘proper disposal’. Hohn’s ideas are more or less in tune with those of Edward Abbey: in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, a Vietnam vet called Hayduke wages guerrilla war on landscape-blighting public works projects but defiantly drops litter along the highways he hates. A few decades later it’s the polluter-sponsored ...”