“... dear middle-age these noodles praise’, when, ‘you’ll say, once all believed,’ from Henry VIII to the ploughman with his paternoster. So it was not a book above and beyond criticism. How ‘traditional’ was this traditional religion (a question Duffy himself asked)? Did Duffy succeed in convincing us that ‘superstition’ was an ...”

“... was often put in mind of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ while reading Mark Ford’s study of Thomas Hardy. Ford doesn’t mention it (though he does refer to Baudelaire’s flaneurial poems), perhaps because that manifesto is too obvious, or too obviously theoretical: he prefers to build his case patiently, historically, in solid empirical ...”

“... of social status; Amy’s family were vaguely theatrical – her father had been a manager for Henry Irving – and thought of themselves approvingly as ‘bohemians’, too good to marry into ‘trade’ (though Amy’s mother was from a family of grocers). The large brick terraced house in Clapham belonged to Amy’s family and its hallway was hung with ...”

“... a hundred-odd to Galsworthy, the same quantity to Ford Madox Ford, ‘several dozen’ to Thomas Wise, an unspecified but obviously vast number to the agent Pinker, and so on. Moreover, the core collection of Jean-Aubry is unreliable, because of ‘unprofessional editing and omissions’, the latter caused by an understandable desire not to give ...”

“... killed off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one ...”

“... and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete. Henry James was snooty about Hardy, but I wonder how James would have done, if given as a kind of literary test a cow’s udder to describe? Admirably, no doubt, with his usual lyrical paradox of oddly precise euphemism, but certainly without the solidity of ...”

“... wartime provided welcome relief from the routine of their ordinary lives. (The sombre figures in Henry Moore’s drawings do not reflect accurately the quality of life in air-raid shelters.) The economic consequences of the bombing in World War Two were less obvious and were often overestimated by those who might have been expected to be well-informed. I was ...”

“... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the ...”

“... think of herself as a ‘joiner’, starts to attend. Later, she and her troubled brother, Henry, consult Margot informally in her capacity as a therapist. This makes a sort of sense, since the role Lizzie herself plays with others tends to be that of amateur shrink. Her husband wishes she was a professional: then they’d be rich. At the meditation ...”

“... the front-liners who actually lived through or died in that ‘abyss of blood and darkness’ (Henry James). In one of his most telling sequences, Fussell reported on a visit to the Somme. Finding it, in the early Seventies, ‘a peaceful but sullen place, un-forgetting and unforgiving’, he tried to conjure some picture of what it might have been ...”

“... gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to ...”

“... fanaticism of the 16th century: the most sordid and shameful era in the national saga. Reviewing Henry Hallam’s 1827 Constitutional History of England, a two-volume work covering the period 1485-1760, Macaulay savaged the English Reformation: In Germany, in France, in Switzerland and in Scotland … worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool ...”

“... to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus and Terence, Seneca and Plutarch, as well ...”

“... not his mistress. It is only by chance that any incriminating letters survive: Dickens’s son Henry and Ellen Ternan’s son Geoffrey Robinson destroyed all such correspondence. Dickens himself burned any personal letters that he could come by. He also destroyed his diaries at the end of every year. One diary – that for 1867 – was lost or, more ...”

“... led a Quaker consortium in buying up the land and began to look for investors. He approached Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found ...”