“... 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 ...”

“... her. And he sees how he can use her fall to punish the four men, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston and George Boleyn (Anne’s brother), who six years before acted in the court masque that celebrated the fall of Cromwell’s master, Cardinal Wolsey. The events of the year 1535-36 become an improvised revenge tragedy, with Cromwell using Anne’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cut loose from mere storytelling, became the stuff of Hollywood iconography. The great virtue of Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford Authors edition of everything Emily (or Charlotte, acting as literary executor) saw fit to print – based on the texts of the 1846 and 1850 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and the 1847 Wuthering Heights – is that it ...”

“... for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing beside tombs or seated in Gothic cloisters. Most are dressed in the style of 1280, but some in that of 1820, and there are numerous attractive young nuns in timeless habits. Hill illustrates a painting ...”

“... own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself. By the Sixties all we conscripts had ...”

“... illustrations, over two thousand five hundred music-type examples – if the dust-cover of Percy Young’s biography of its founder is to be believed. The New Grove, as it is called, is not really the product of a machine (though rumours of its adventures with computer setting have sometimes made it seem so), but its editorial set-up has tended to give that ...”

“... dinner with the Sedleys in Vanity Fair. The curry is so hot that her tears flow, and seeing this young Jos offers her chillies, which she gratefully accepts because they sound so cool. There is a roar of laughter at her ensuing distress, its heartlessness showing what the family are like, as well as making the little adventuress herself much more human. At ...”

“... acquired all his knowledge at second-hand from informants such as Hastings’s arch-enemy Philip Francis. Indeed, the strangest feature of the impeachment was that Warren Hastings was the man in the dock. For in contrast to his more openly greedy predecessors, Hastings is credited with having established a genuinely enlightened despotism in Bengal. Seeking ...”

“... husband, and a close friend of men and women of the intellectual calibre of Bentham, the young John Stuart Mill, Francis Jeffrey, until recently editor of the Edinburgh Review, the Grotes, the Romillys, the Carlyles. A more weighty anchor to conventionality was her ten-year-old daughter Lucy. All this was now put ...”

“... of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years ...”

“... too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Apocalypse ...”

“... were not fundamentally good at this sort of thing.’ Several had an aeronautical background; young Mr Tebbit had been an airline pilot. But as they investigated Black Arrow, among the other items on their agenda, they found that only the aerospace companies directly involved in producing it seemed to be in favour, while support for it in government was ...”