“... it seems that everyone was in some sort of a hurry, though, as Fender makes clear, they were by no means only after the loot – many of them were just, well, ‘rushing’). But the West is also America itself, and ‘plotting’ is much more than charting the best route from Salt Lake City to Sacramento. Let Fender make the crucial point: ‘The problem ...”

“... and the coterie of Oxford women who had been instrumental in founding Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall must have given suffragists pause.For a time, then, and as Bush implies, the suffrage battle was less a ‘sex war’ than an argument among women – and one that did not divide neatly along progressive v. reactionary lines. Busy running settlement houses ...”

“... a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a subject I paid a disastrous visit to Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, thinking I might do something on the Franciscans. There had been a torrential thunderstorm and forgetting to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all ...”

“... estates. Others tried to cling on. The Earl of Powis stuck bravely by his decaying home, Lymore Hall in Montgomery until, at a church fête in 1921, ‘without any audible premonitory symptoms’, the earl and twenty of his guests suddenly fell through the floor of the great hall into the cellar. After that, sale was ...”

“... to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct ...”

“... down in a stream with her legs in the air. Footprints incriminate Edith’s estranged husband, John, who had left her for a barmaid nine years previously. Shardlake suspects John Boleyn has been framed. If he hangs, which seems likely, it would scandalise Elizabeth, who orders an investigation and wants him pardoned if ...”

“... Why were you late (a few years late)? Or perhaps you were a whole lifetime late? Why is there no time-table for love? And it comes with no bell and no signal ... For the trains there are green signals waiting. The trains set off on long wanderings; only you, beloved, stay here, and ...”

“... sea.’ The weird uplift the rhyme gives to ‘we’ lends the doldrums a flicker of impudence. John Bayley heard in these lines Auden’s enjoyment ‘of the possibilities of making the situation stylish … the esplanade, and the hilarious precision of sopping and dingy, only give the reader that retrospective warmth which comes from remembering the ...”

“... the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack. Geoffrey Robertson has set out to rescue him from the enormous disregard of posterity, and from ...”

“... in the grate and a smelly tallow candle to hold back the night. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Vaux-Hall’ (c.1784). For the price of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the ...”

“... they went to the local officials and the priest they couldn’t find any trace of his grave and no one knew or would say what had happened to his remains. The explanation given to my distraught grandmother was that there had been fighting around Roquebrune and that in the confusion all burial records had been lost. The family was determined to discover what ...”

“... at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also ...”

“... foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities’) no one actually knows how therapeutically effective its 12-step Program is. Estimates vary from the 75 per cent success rate claimed in its wilder promotional material to ‘only one in thirty makes it to a six-month chip,’ the chip being a plastic counter ...”

“... Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by ...”

“... was a church, at Pennington, with an 1170 Norse inscription and also a recently excavated sheelagh-na-gig (a pre-Christian mother-goddess exposing her vulva); Swarthmoor Hall, where George Fox established the Society of Friends, and got the squire who was protecting him in trouble with the locals; and Conishead Priory, a ...”