“... for people to find their own national dishes the tastiest and to prefer the way mother used to cook. The perfect miso ramen doesn’t move Germans the way it does Japanese, and in Juzo Itami’s film Tampopo the search for noodle soup perfection isn’t about innovation but integrity, getting at the essence of stock, noodles, pork, seaweed and spring ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... London house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the countess was violently assaulted and her husband, John Bingham, seventh earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes. The story has the violent glamour of crime fiction with the additional thrill of reality, and the facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of ...”

“... not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in Children of ...”

“... This was colloquially known as the royal numerals case, brought by the nationalist politician John MacCormick against the assumption by the new queen of the style Elizabeth II – though she was patently the first monarch by the name of Elizabeth to reign over the post-1707 United Kingdom. Although Cooper found that MacCormick had no standing to bring the ...”

“... melancholic Mrs Joan Drake, who fell about when paid a professional visit by the famous divine John Dod because he reminded her of the character of Ananias in The Alchemist. Lake turns the story around. It was because Dod with his great beard and upturned eyes really existed that Jonson was able to put him into his play, even if disguised as a separatist ...”

“... the young Welby Pugin and old Colonel Phillips, who had been round the world with Captain Cook, were welcome to keep Smith company while he dried out mouldy Rembrandts in front of the fire. Bores, among whom he numbered Haydon, were told there was no room. In the galleries of the museum where Napoleon’s Egyptian antiquities, captured by the ...”

“... evil stepmother (‘The Juniper Tree’). She will have the baby, but he will be kidnapped by the cook, and she will be imprisoned and starved in a tower (‘The Pink’). She will have the baby, but on her fifteenth birthday her pretty daughter will prick herself with a spindle and sleep for one hundred years (‘Little Briar Rose’). If you get what you ...”

“... good material for a more scholarly examination of such matters. So while the gardener and the cook in me found many points of interest, the historian found herself bristling with questions, almost all of which remained unanswered. How did the head gardener actually turn a ‘common field’ into a paradise? What tools and landscaping machinery were or ...”

“... both landed and unlanded ways of being far from the madding crowd). Gabriel has been signed on as cook, and she can scarcely separate the actual voyage from the recording of it, which she does daily and religiously by speaking into a tape recorder and sending the tapes home to her mother in England. She is, perhaps, the representative of that dubious ...”

“... that he had believed his client to be totally innocent all along. As my friend and former landlord John O’Sullivan used to be fond of saying (and him a Catholic and all, and editor of the National Review) if the Pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to ...”

“... future of socialism may lie more with William Morris than with Herbert Morrison,’ Robin Cook said in 1987. Morris died over ninety years ago, but remains wise and relevant for his insistence on combining social justice with a respect for nature. Can the Left recover his kind of vision, and can it win the support of its fellow-citizens? Or is the ...”

“... he decided he was a suitable recruit for the voyage to the South Seas on which he and Captain Cook would shortly be setting forth. Such a voyage was sure to turn up an abundance of plants and animals new to science, and artists were required for the purpose of making an on-the-spot record of the living appearance of specimens which the collecting methods ...”

“... half. Relief at home at this time was intermittent, Vaizey reports, since poor Mrs Macleod had to cook for the ‘cannibals’. Nevertheless, Macleod was the most successful of the four politicians. Boyle and Crosland both gathered ill-will at Education, trying to effect the re-organisation of the secondary schools. Crosland did some characteristically clever ...”

“... body to body, remains consistent. ‘It was not sex,’ but neither (to pick up an echo from John Donne) was it a mixing of souls. In ‘The Missing’, Gunn writes of his friends as ‘an involved increasing family’ (another family) of gay lovers: Contact of friend led to another friend, Supple entwinement through the living mass Which for all that I ...”