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“... the encounter with Edward Penn, aged seven, muralist; Edwin’s doomed love for the sullen Rose Dorn, third-grade femme fatale; Rose’s fiery end; the improbable friendship with Arnold Hasselstrom, inarticulate playground psychopath; the romantically tortured genesis of Cartoons, complete with feverish bouts of ...”

“... Transactions, while John Evelyn’s circle was enriched with new names like Susanna Packe and Ann Glyd. This seems right, and is a way of opening up our conception of experimental science in the period, particularly given the frequency with which recipes in manuscript collections are subscribed probatum est (‘It has been tested’), or ‘the best ...”

“... As Michael Hattaway reminds us in his eloquent new study of Elizabethan Popular Theatre, the Rose, the Curtain, the Globe and the rest did not define the drama that they housed. Far more important than the ‘wooden O’ and ‘cockpit’ were those shared attitudes to language and illusion, spectacle and narrative that generations of actors and ...”

“... are going to turn round and tell you it isn’t? This test is, however, triumphantly passed by Ann Barr, Peter York and the intrepid and diligent team of assistant fieldworkers with whom they have penetrated far and deep into the rose-red canyons of SW3, 1, 7, 10, 6 and 5 – correctly ranked in that order – and the ...”

“... is a study in the waste of beauty and genius. The autodidact poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that ...”

“... a ‘milky circle’. She has come to Almería with her mother to seek a last hope treatment for Rose’s leg paralysis (she calls her mother by her name) at the Gómez Clinic. Eleven years ago her father left them in London and returned to Greece. He had a religious conversion, inherited a vast shipping fortune just as the euro was collapsing, and married a ...”

“... than the crab for the part of the doomsday creature on the terminal beach. According to Lisa-Ann Gershwin’s disturbing book, the jellyfish is an ‘angel of death’, a harbinger of ‘planetary doom’ likely to be the ‘last man standing’ in what she describes as our ‘gelatinous future’.Jellyfish are immensely old. From the fossil evidence, we ...”

“... stretched above the haze of smoke. Rows of red-brick houses radiated on all sides and above them rose blocks of factories with many of their windows catching the light.’ There’s a piece of scene-painting for the nostalgic to latch onto. A novel like McLaverty’s Call my brother back (1939) offers a view of Belfast as unpretentious as a game of hopscotch ...”

“... It was the timid new President, Joseph Kasavubu, who replied to the King. But then Patrice Lumumba rose. The King turned pale. Lumumba started by explaining that independence was not a generous gift from Brussels, but had been won by the people’s struggle for freedom against the colonialists. Leopold’s ‘Congo Free State’ had been no more than ...”

“... and are themselves a study in social and geographical mobility. His brother George Marsh rose from a humble navy clerkship to occupy the position once held by Samuel Pepys. In 1755 he secured for Milbourne a senior administrative post at the port of Mahón in Minorca. It was a huge rise in status and income. Once on the island, Elizabeth could call ...”

“... July heat”, sauntering comfortably through Norfolk for two weeks, visiting “the birthplace of Ann Boleyn”, with its “spacious silences, fine old libraries, old trees, and breezy expanses”, and “ancient Norwich itself”, with its “grand Cathedral”.’ And: ‘ “The subject” had not “the least” grown “lovelier” to him; “nor ...”

“... Her lover rides a hundred miles to see her, and her dull cousin’s fiancé, Gregory Rose, leaves everything to follow her. ‘What makes you all love me so?’ she asks. But Olive, by her own account, had read, at this stage, no other fiction at all. And the African Farm, as it goes on, is a very strange book. Lyndall, in the end, is nursed on ...”

“... In her recent collection Stories, Theories and Things, Christine Brooke-Rose was casting around for a generic term under which to classify such diverse novels as Midnight’s Children, Terra Nostra and Dictionary of the Khazars, and came up with ‘palimpsest history’. What all of these books have in common is their interest in the recreation of a national history: a history which, in each case, has been erased or fragmented, subsumed beneath layers of interpretation, forgetting, writing and rewriting ...”

“... between his own unorthodox love life and that of the sexually emancipated heroines of his novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911) for a while put him beyond the pale even for some of the more progressive sections of London society. As a result, any biography of Wells is bound to have a lot to say about sex. His sexual career may have ...”

“... or inspirational lyrics. ‘In the hands of its editors,’ she writes persuasively, ‘the novel rose piecemeal: islands of lyric or didactic or sententious collectibles bobbing up occasionally from a sea of dispensable narrative. The novel could not have become respectable without the tokenism embodied in the anthology.’ Anthologies are not just a ...”