“... function of aimless thought? There is a marvellous example of the authenticity of random memory in Henry IV, Part 2. In a famous scene in the tavern at Eastcheap, Mistress Quickly is trying to get Falstaff to pay his debts. He feigns not to remember that he has borrowed money from her and she launches into a tirade: Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt ...”

“... your very soul’ – and is rewarded by the child’s parents with a ‘7 ft. sash … peacock green embroidered with gold’. He assists at the birth of one of his sisters: ‘she were a little foal a calf her eyes were wide her newborn skin glistening white and bloody nothing bad had ever touched her.’ This has the unfortunate consequence that ‘every ...”

“... some derelict cottages. Local opposition, orchestrated by the future Conservative home secretary, Henry Brooke, was fierce. Goldfinger – assisted by such influential neighbours as Roland Penrose, Flora Robson and Julian Huxley – successfully defended his design, citing its kinship to the formal articulation and clarity of the Georgian terrace. ‘Only the ...”

“... being used to underpin Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major novelists – Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett – interrogated what Skinner calls ‘Whig complacencies’. Britons did not groan under the yoke of absolute monarchy, but many of them lived at the whim of others, whether as servants, marriageable young ...”

“... in which the cabinet meets pitiful, with its chandeliers and mantelpiece carriage clock and long green baize table. The blog post has pictures meant to show how old-fashioned it is compared to Nasa’s Mission Control, or the control centres for power grids and the Large Hadron Collider, with their open-plan seating and banks of screens that show everyone ...”

“... ideas were emerging as English Perpendicular, the fine-boned local expression of Gothic. Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before ...”

“... highways; the border with the Dominican Republic was closed. The unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, in post since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021, was in Kenya, where he had flown a few days earlier to negotiate the deployment of a ‘multinational security support force’. No one wanted him back. Even the president of the Dominican Republic ...”

“... told his early lover Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘I’m like a baby in the dark,’ he explained to Henry Treece, an Apocalyptic poet who wrote the first critical book about him, and with whom Thomas had a long and revealing correspondence. Being infantile was useful as a would-be disarming way of acknowledging his worldly incompetence: ‘These apologies, we ...”

“... the galvanised iron relief by Donald Judd wouldn’t have looked better over there, where the green lacquered one was. The two things that struck me most forcefully about him were his innocence – he had, after all, agreed to speak to me ‘off the record’ despite all the horrible innuendoes I had made about him, and his ordinariness, in my Guardian ...”

“... Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes against property ...”

“... journal with the impressive title of Discourse Agatha Christie’s Endless Night is compared with Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. Who – we may murmur – cares who killed Milly ...”

“... over the idea that every writer must be an artist of the first class,’ the director of the FWP, Henry G. Alsberg, said: I think we have invested art with this sort of sacrosanct, ivory-tower atmosphere too much. The craftsmen who worked on the cathedrals were anonymous . . . I think cheap books, less fuss about our sacred personalities, and more service to ...”

“... knew his work was exposed to weathering. The land artists are at ease with change. They go beyond Henry Moore’s pleasure in the greening of his bronzes by oxidation (especially near the sea). Talking to John Fowles in 1987, Andy Goldsworthy came out with this wonderfully relaxed notion: ‘Ten years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still ...”

“... The Country Child, both for adult readers, she brought ‘the whole of my childhood, eternal and green’ to a very large number of readers. ‘The figures of my mother and father come alive and talk gravely to one another.’ Even Little Grey Rabbit and Milkman Hedgehog, she insists, are Late Victorian rustics. In a foreword to the later editions, she wrote ...”

“... Each footstep stirred A melancholy shriek from vines that trailed Up a cathedral’s height to the green mist, And drifting down were scattered veils of light. I do not doubt the benevolence of that Untrodden place. We lived. And were five years Upon the island, where every shape betrayed The trailing hem of nature. Nothing was asked, Nothing vouchsafed which ...”