“... creations are silk panels in the Cavendish Hanging – now displayed at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk – featuring sewn images of a South American armadillo, known as a tatou, as well as a toucan sitting on a branch and another ‘byrde of America’, possibly a blond-crested woodpecker from Amazonia. In 1569, Henry VIII’s former barber-surgeon, Edmund ...”

“... In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to sentences, stopping the game at intervals to listen to the BBC news crackling from the wireless, its fretwork grill sawn to represent an inappropriately Japanese-style rising sun. By the time we reached ...”

“... He was obliged to stay in Trinidad with the larger ships and entrust the mission to his friend Lawrence Keymis, who had been to the gold-mine with him in 1595: Ralegh sent him up the Orinoco with five small ships and three hundred men. Keymis managed to bring the ships back safely, but he failed in everything else. There had been a battle with the ...”

“... a train during one of his blackouts). Spencer’s reputation as a poet, like Robert Graves’s and Lawrence Durrell’s, has always been tainted by his association with the Mediterranean, an injustice which the Collected Poems, intelligently edited by Roger Bowen, seeks to put right. The volume shows how travel encouraged in Spencer both a casual, accumulative ...”

“... abusing blacks loudly, with impunity: a farmer shouting at his Somali servants in the bar of the Norfolk Hotel, a tea planter skippering a team from Kericho at cricket on the only grass pitch in Kenya at Limuru who gabbled with rage in kitchen Swahili as African women and children calmly processed across a corer of the outfield and finally ...”

“... or journalism and little feeling for most writing done after about 1918. Eliot, Huxley, Lawrence and Joyce were too ‘painfully subjective’, he wrote in 1939, giving their work ‘the character of meaningless masturbation’. Auden was no good either, and Hamilton’s contact with the circles that came to dominate the received story of the 1930s ...”

“... controversy to the margins’. There, pockets of Whig resistance no doubt remain – readers of Lawrence Stone’s correspondence with Russell in the TLS not so long ago might be surprised to learn the field had become so pacific. Yet even Stone has conceded the second part of the victory the revisionists claim. For he, too, has opined that the Marxist ...”

“... his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing. But thereafter, particularly when she was in Norfolk, and even in Scotland, Her Majesty began to do a regular stint at the lectern. And not merely the lectern. Visiting a Norfolk primary school she sat down on a classroom chair and read a story from Babar to the ...”