“... great-uncle was the eighth King Edward, for instance, ignores Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In other respects, it was already in existence. In the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, a king was determined by his ...”

“... show the same division: Latin is Q-Italic, with quattuor and quinque.) In ninth-century Britain, Cornish and Welsh were P-Celtic languages, and so was the language of the people whose heroes in Welsh poetic tradition were the gwyr y gogledd, the ‘men of the North’: that is, the inhabitants of south-west Scotland, whose kingdom of Strathclyde reached ...”

“... to adapt a phrase, a prong short of a pitchfork. And whereas Pynchon and Algren, and more recently William Vollman, tend to have sought out big city trash, Benedict is more at home among the rocks and trees with God’s own good dirt. His one fully-committed excursion from the bush, ‘At the Alhambra’, describing a vacation in Nicaragua, is his least ...”

“... as coast harpies and land monsters, salvagers were beneath contempt. The 17th-century preacher William Johnson inveighed against ‘the Countrey people enriching themselves with the losses of other men, the worst way of getting in the world’.It suited a lot of people to blame anonymous mobs of wreckers: merchants trying to claim compensation for their ...”

“... Dead, Carl Watkins tells one of the earliest ‘veridical’ English ghost stories, recorded by William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon in Yorkshire in the 1190s. It’s a tale Bram Stoker could have used, one that could feature in the more old-fashioned sort of horror film even today. A local man who became convinced that his wife was unfaithful hid in ...”

“... get Keating. We’re going to fucking get you.’ While investigating the case in London, the Cornish police visited galleries, dealers and ‘known associates’ of the suspects, including an antique-dealer friend of mine. He answered their questions as fully as he thought prudent. Then, as the police were leaving, one of them turned in the doorway, just ...”

“... this large island. Newfoundland’s waters had been exploited by Spanish, Portuguese and Cornish fishermen since at least the 16th century. Theirs was a hugely profitable industry that supplied the whole of Catholic Europe with salt cod and made many fortunes long before the Cape Codders arrived to join in the plunder of this seemingly inexhaustible ...”

“... or am unhappy.’ This is Boswell in 1777, at the age of 37. In 1789 a letter to the depressing Cornish vicar William Temple reports: ‘I may have many gratifications but the comfort of life is at an end.’ His friend and master, Samuel Johnson, is dead. His ‘valuable spouse’, a spouse much deserted, has just ...”

“... the circumstances, unavoidable.The Smiths were a family of significance. Bodichon’s grandfather William inherited a great wholesale grocery business, and in the 1780s and 1790s bought himself social and political status. The family home in Clapham was exchanged for a magnificent town house by Hyde Park and two hundred acres in Essex. He acquired Old Masters ...”

“... re-crosses the Channel. It can only be at his instigation that we are advised on the jacket of The Cornish Dancer to regard Notes from an Old Country as ‘the best gloss on his own poems’. And it’s no good objecting that the Channel-crossing has this effect on him: others of us have found it among the luxuries of expatriation that we can extend to the ...”

“... linguistics in connection with the discovery that ancient British (the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Breton) and ancient Gaulish, which had been known to be related since the time of Tacitus, were also related to the Gaelic language of Ireland and Scotland. The first convincing demonstration of this fact was made by the polymath Edward Lhuyd, of the ...”

“... he lists Henry Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants ...”

“... where the Seven Deadly Sins had staked out appropriate shops (Gluttony took over the Real Cornish Pasty Company); in the cathedral, the damnation of Samuel West’s Faustus was staged at the high altar. But since the first half of the play was staged in the Minerva Theatre, it still only played to a maximum of three hundred spectators per ...”

“... look now’ was filmed not by Hitchcock, but by Nicolas Roeg. In the entry on Mrs Warre-Cornish the Companion attributes to the author two novels actually written by her husband. At the age of 17, Florence Warden was taught by finishing governesses – she was not employed as one. Elizabeth Linington writes her Vic Varallo (not ‘Vatallo’) novels ...”

“... different as the North African desert, Norwegian villages, Mozart’s Vienna and (repeatedly) the Cornish coast, some of his early work has the dreamlike quality of introspective monologue – a genre which is hardly ever free from self-absorption and self-indulgence. But he has always been on the move, and in the literary sense too. At the beginning of his ...”