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“... Governor George Gipps, portrayed with careful scholarship and a novelist’s empathy by Roger Millis in his monumental Water-loo Creek (1992), arrived in Sydney in 1838 wielding the report of a House of Commons committee chaired by the Quaker anti-slavery campaigner and philanthropist Thomas Fowell Buxton. The report was scathing about the treatment ...”

“... marriage, his growing irritability and an obscure triangular relationship with his wife and a young woman called Leontine Chipman, nicknamed Canada. After Willie’s death his widow Emily and Canada lived happily ever after, until Emily died leaving everything to Canada and nothing to Forster, who was disappointed. The domestic and sexual permutations ...”

“... Muslims have gone off in search of glory on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. Most of these young jihadis became radicalised online not in the mosque. Some, like the perpetrators of the attacks in January and November, have histories of arrest and time spent in prison; about 25 per cent of IS’s French recruits are thought to be converts to Islam. What ...”

“... girls, ‘very lively, and very faulty’. In 1731, after a dogged ten-year courtship, she married Roger Bradshaigh, the son of a baronet. The couple took on his family estate of Haigh Hall near Wigan in 1742 and drew a comfortable income from its coal reserves; they remained childless but were busy and happy managing Haigh, and visiting her brother-in-law the ...”

“... Roger Harris​ is from Roxbury, in Boston. For decades he taught in the school system there. He wears a grey pinstripe suit; his smart bow-tie has a purple streak. He looks patient yet tough, as durable as a former athlete. But he had days in 1967 as a young Marine near the DMZ in Vietnam – the demilitarised zone, aka the ‘dead Marine zone’ – that he can’t talk about:You go over there with one mindset and then you adapt ...”

“... of rhetorical questions and ‘who can knows’. Things brighten for the reader as soon as the young Edwin Lutyens appears. The collaboration between architect and gardener was central to both careers and Sally Festing adds to the growing perception that, at least to begin with, Lutyens owed more to his ‘Aunt Bumps’ than has sometimes been ...”

“... Parthenon. It isn’t clear that the journey to Arezzo was made by many British artists. But the young Edgar Degas went there in the summer of the very year that Layard’s article appeared. Soon afterwards, Degas began his large canvas (now in the Musée d’Orsay) of Semiramis Directing the Building of Babylon. The gracious but rigid pose of the Queen and ...”

“... in 1354, Sultan Abu Inan was so impressed with his tales that he commissioned Ibn Juzayy, a young Andalusian scholar Ibn Battutah had met four years before in Granada, to transcribe them. The Rihlah (‘Travels’) represented, in its length and complexity, the apogee of a genre then flourishing in North Africa. It is still a defining text in the ...”

“... and several more besides. In August 1873, writing to one of his favourite correspondents, Edma Roger des Genettes, he claimed that since the previous September he had read and made notes on 194 titles, and his final estimate was that he had consulted some 1500 in all – a research curriculum the like of which can seldom if ever have crossed the mind of ...”

“... a novelist who will tell you, as she does in Sylvia’s Lovers, what kinds of shoes and stockings young girls wore in the late 18th century, or that smugglers on the coast near Whitby were helped by farmers on the bluffs to haul up illegal goods hidden in buckets of seaweed. Gaskell’s elaboration of details about places and households can give a clearer ...”

“... substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young cows); statue, trolley and rails are in turn mounted on a platform bearing the inscription DUAL, followed by a bracket and two forms of an ancient Greek verb. When a carefully trained magpie activates an internal spring with its beak, the platform slowly ...”

“... Federal Army, though illness prevented him fighting for the other side. He now persuaded two other young men to accompany him on a voyage to Turkey. The younger one, the 17-year-old Lewis Noe, he subjected to all kinds of humiliations, finally tying him to a tree on some flimsy pretext and whipping him till the blood ran. Worse things would happen to the ...”

“... never to return. He tried other ways of securing his manuscript, which included entrusting it to a young Englishman, Brooke Boothby, whom he had known in Derbyshire. It was he who published a version of the first Dialogue in Lichfield, after Rousseau’s death, but it was not until 1958 that the complete work appeared in Paris. It was because he was ...”

“... published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is attractive about Powell, and a good deal of what makes his compatriots occasionally shy away from ...”

“... orientation. In this context, Malise Ruthven’s journey – which begins at the tomb of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven ...”