“... virtue, making reading the book like saying ‘a tragic, pagan, exotic rosary’. Another admirer, Francis Wyndham, stayed non-committal about the subject-matter: ‘The narrator is a young girl in love with a married man. That is the “story”.’ Wyndham proved not to be cautious enough. From the Journals now published ...”

“... ways re-enacted, though on a less exalted level, by her deserted husband’s granddaughter. Young women succumbing to India generally do so in the arms of some delectable Indian or other: ‘She felt drawn to him by a strength, a magnetism that she had never yet in all her life experienced with anyone,’ we are told of absconding Olivia in Heat and ...”

“... 1980s: sitting indoors, in sprawling, often unfinished estates watching films with the devotion of young people with nothing else to do. We may have been wearing American T-shirts and jeans, lip gloss promoted by models (the legacy of the boom was the awful homogenisation of everything), but we still recited lines from films with the same conviction that Barry ...”

“... St Stephen’s of University College Dublin, was rejecting ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ by a young troublemaker called James Joyce. He wasn’t turned down by everyone: his description of the Irish Homestead as ‘the pigs’ paper’ may have been a way of covering his blushes – early versions of three Dubliners stories appeared there, one of them ...”

“... documented a class-divided sport, the directors helping themselves to the boardroom buffet while young fans died on the terraces. Taylor recommended that run-down grounds be modernised and terraces replaced with seats (the latter change was applied only in the top two divisions). His verdict was damning – ‘old grounds, poor ...”

“... was incapable of reform or of accepting the discipline that comes with globalisation. French young people, it was said, had proved as incorrigibly conservative as their elders and were foolishly clinging to a social model that history has condemned. This interpretation of events has little connection with reality. Like every other European ...”

“... her daughter’s similarity to herself. It had taken her years to become as she was, and Evvie was young. Evvie should be different, as she herself had been.’ The slushy novel is based on a local vet fantasised by Evvie into a sterling Scottish hero: in real life he is a sandy-haired and unremarkable person with the accent of a suburban Londoner. A proper ...”

“... of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she owned tapestries, sculptures, paintings (including Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait) and a library of nearly four hundred books. Her maids of honour came from all over Europe. In a letter to ...”

“... humanist. Barrell’s own discourse replaced the painters themselves by Shaftesbury, Addison, Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and the Reynolds of the Discourses; partly because he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth ...”

“... Look at any postcard of an interwar Islington street, and you will see why. Soon though, as the young started to heap their avant-garde disdain on suburbia, the centre embarked on a come-back, only to have its fragile renaissance crushed by bombers and planners. Since then, hopes and fears for London have yo-yoed, along with the values on its Stock Exchange ...”

“... it’s OK for little boys to run round wearing Liverpool shirts or shouting ‘I’ll be Trevor Francis,’ this is strongly frowned upon for even slightly bigger boys. One remembers the games teacher in Kes who ran the whole football session so he could pretend he was Bobby Charlton. Everybody does this in their heads, just like Walter Mitty, but let it ...”

“... World War because it raised the hackles of Pan-Serbian nationalism. A welcome new biography of Francis Joseph by the French historian, Professor Jean-Paul Bled, comes as a useful and erudite reminder of all that, for the outcome of the annexation now has its painful parallel in the outcome of Europe’s hasty recognitions of breakaway fragments of what is ...”

“... looks like an unconvincing cover-up (as well as bad demography), it did not appear so at the time. Francis Galton, at least, was so struck by the report that he wrote to Henry Sidgwick (the philosopher and Eleanor’s husband, widely believed, ironically, to be impotent – at least they had no children) suggesting a scheme for getting more of these ...”

“... the physical geography of the planet, and neither kind of exploration is untainted by the other. Francis Spufford describes the history of this interaction and examines its consequences. He makes the claim with his title (I May Be Some Time) and subtitle (‘Ice and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless ...”

“... of society’. Reviewing Southey’s oriental romance, Thalaba the Destroyer, late in 1802, Francis Jeffrey in the first number of the Edinburgh Review brings up the Cottle connection for the first time. Recalling Southey’s earlier political notoriety and Wordsworth’s Preface, he turns the latter by selective quotation into the democratic manifesto ...”