“... the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I ...”

“... spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired ...”

“... died in 1703, the pride of his life – three thousand books, lavishly gilded and bound in brown leather – passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had once been a student. The college had scarcely any record of him apart from a reprimand for ‘having been scandalously overseen in drink’, but that no longer mattered. The bequest included ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... was thought to be the artistic member of the family. She was sent to take painting classes with Edward Hopper, the son of the man who owned the local dry goods store. Joseph preferred to stay at home, immersed in Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.The nostalgia Cornell had for the amusements of his youth, and the reverence with which he ...”

“... when you write,’ his uncle the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft advised him. Sassoon himself wrote to Edward Carpenter (one of his many gurus on a variety of subjects, in this case how to live a free life as a homosexual): ‘I’m one of those people who can only learn things by coming into the closest possible contact with them.’ He was well aware that he ...”

“... Times for news of the Anschluss, I found a letter to the editor, dated 2 April 1938, from the Hon. Edward Stonor. Improbable as it sounds, he was hoping for some game shooting in Austria, and saw no reason for German field artillery to deflect his plan. ‘At Buchs, on the Swiss-Austrian frontier,’ he writes:We were invaded by six or seven very young Nazi ...”

“... washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives ...”

“... somewhere came a transistor radio’s plastic sizzle. There it was again: all the roofs, and the brown life of the river, and the grey cathedral, which stands over the town watching it, and its two enormous towers, each of them showing a dark, louvred belfry – when I was a boy I used to think of those belfries as God’s lungs. Two of the saints of the ...”

“... she was herself French, but we know of two earlier maids in the Mountjoy household – Margaret Brown and Joan Langford – and both were English. Could Mountjoy’s servant and concubine in 1613 be Frances Williams? This is speculation, of course, though it would explain why Mountjoy ends up being charged along with the three Frenchmen. As the evidence of ...”

“... bones’ and he was ‘incessantly smoking cigarettes, the long fingers straying to the straggling brown moustache’. Crane smoked as if cigarettes alone were keeping him alive. ‘He could not talk,’ a niece wrote, ‘unless he was walking up and down the room with his hands stuffed into his pockets and a cigarette balanced on his lips.’ It is this niece ...”

“... love, solicit so greedily. Sallow lips that quiver as though from tears choked back, golden-brown hair in locks half undone shadowing her forehead … And once again her eyes. – As though for this life’s secret they sought the grave solution … Will they ever find it? – There? – I do not know. Only sometimes in sleepless nights do these eyes ...”

“... with the time to deal with them and it fell to a then comparatively junior Treasury official, Edward Playfair, to draft replies in the interstices of time between dealing with dozens of other topics. His reply was rightly uncompromising. The British were sceptical of Nuremberg and all the subsidiary trials for numbers of reasons, some good, some ...”

“... aspect: the supposed portrait of Beatrice by Guido Reni, which shows a beautiful young girl with brown hair and wide, lustrous eyes. According to tradition – scrupulously nurtured by all the 19th-century writers on the subject – the portrait was taken from the life during Beatrice’s imprisonment, in late 1598 or 1599. An alternative tradition, taking ...”

“... much needed, since Annan’s own powers of expression were wooden to say the least. This pair, Edward Mortimer and Nader Mousavizadeh, came from the Financial Times and the New Republic respectively, two publications whose political profiles need little specification. Not surprisingly, Annan’s various pronouncements, applauded for their eloquence by ...”