“... blindly to power and authority’.This will not do. They were ‘ordinary men’ – the title of Christopher Browning’s indispensable book – who shot, day after day, at close range, men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands. The social psychology of the past three decades seems to belie the notion that a deviant personality is necessary to ...”

“... he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ...”

“... just coming into leaf. We go down the hill to Well to look at the towering pinnacle of fretted wood over the font, 1352 and the second oldest in England. Then on to Jervaulx, one of the few monastic ruins not run by the Department of National Heritage but by its country-house owners, for whom it must once have been like an elaborate folly. The ruins are ...”

“... he’d call it a night. A more congenial cruising ground, at least in milder weather, was along Christopher Street. I enjoyed sitting with him on the stoops and taking in the world while he was taking in the talent. One time we were sitting there, probably around midnight, and two straight guys walked by, probably Jersey boys, and muttered something about ...”

“... which, as the judge explained, ran counter to the accused man’s beliefs. It turned out that Christopher Elman, the defendant, was a sovereign citizen.I’d only vaguely heard of this newish category of far-right dissidence, an offshoot of the militia and Patriot movements, that viewed the constitution as a fraudulent or (at best) purely commercial ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”