“... Appalachia (aka ‘the county’) in the mid-21st century, where the point of view belongs to a young woman called Flynne Fisher; and half in London seventy years later, seen through the eyes of a young man called Wilf Netherton. The characters in the different timeframes are able to interact with each other, but only ...”

“... mischief elsewhere; the hobbledehoy squires wore their muddy boots in other ballrooms; and the young ladies whose maiden virtue had survived unstrumpeted moved on to encounter rude shocks in the real world. It so happened that when Nash died, in 1761, a battered and angry old beau, recreational fashion was changing. The English were displaying a loss of ...”

“... went without them.Corseting has a much longer history. One of the objects excavated at Knossos by Arthur Evans’s team was a Minoan snake goddess figurine (c.1600 BC) sporting a thick, corset-like belt around her tiny waist. An illumination in the Winchester Psalter (c.1121-61) shows Christ being tempted by the Devil in rather sexy contemporary women’s ...”

“... career is one of the great success stories of Late Victorian letters. In 1871 he was an obscure young architect’s assistant who had just published a barely passable novel, Desperate Remedies. By 1873, on the appearance of A Pair of Blue Eyes, he was enjoying an agreeable intimacy with the formidable Leslie Stephen and his charming sister-in-law, Anne ...”

“... that unilateral damage led to malfunction, so that the spare tyre idea was not very fruitful. Arthur Wigan had been attracted to considerations about the duality of the brain when he had attended an autopsy and observed, much to his disquiet, that when a particular skull had been opened, the brain of an apparently perfectly normal individual had one ...”

“... imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is ...”

“... Fernande had been the second wife of Yourcenar’s proud father, Michel de Crayencour: the young daughter subsequently enjoyed sisterly or motherly relationships with her father’s ‘mistresses or quasi-mistresses and later his third wife’. As a septuagenarian in 1974, Yourcenar noted that she was more than twice as old as Fernande had been in ...”

“... who amassed one of the finest private libraries in the country. Born the fifth child of seven, the young Michael grew up among a veritable forest of Foots, all passionately committed to the Liberal verities in a household where a radical Whig sense of history, literature and rhetoric was not just part of the furniture but pretty much what life was for. Most of ...”

“... butter. It makes the breast moist and the skin crisp and flavourful’), another in which a thin young woman buys a giant scone from a wholefood bakery (‘one scone, a single thing . . . a loaf of a scone . . . a dry, crumbly endeavour’). Such moments, however, are characteristic only in the dry, almost campy, precision of the rendered ...”

“... The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for ...”

“... to change the contours of ancient Greek literature. Between 1896 and 1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the ancient rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchos, in Upper Egypt; hundreds of lost literary texts emerged, together with unprecedented information about the people who read and eventually discarded them.* Authors who had been little more than ...”

“... and George Devine returned to acting. When they talked about forming a theatre company neither the young Tony Richardson nor the much older Devine knew what they wanted: ‘a new theatre – he didn’t know what. I wanted a new theatre too, and I didn’t know how,’ Richardson writes. But if the ambitious young Oxford ...”

“... the British sausage. His life has been pitched at an agreeable social and professional level. As a young man he danced four nights running at Holyrood Palace with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, something he says he had ‘entirely forgotten’ until he found in his papers a ‘Dear Ludo’ letter from Princess Elizabeth thanking him for his wedding ...”

“... unconsciously needing a man’s hand, that of the phantom Mr Rochester or the real curate, Arthur Bell Nichols, who was still to come. And Emily seems in her own unwilling way to have also been the imaginative catalyst in their world. Katherine Frank makes the interesting point that both Charlotte and Anne, in their second published novels, drew ...”

“... name as Madonna? Could it be the teenage murder of a half-brother, the abandonment of his young wife to his enemies to save his skin, the execution of his closest friend, a blood-brother since childhood, by dismemberment, and (in all probability) the poisoning of his eldest son as well? This all sounds much more like Renaissance Italy than the ...”