“... to his word, and sets off to meet his doom. His journey takes him into the wilderness – beyond north Wales and somewhere past the Wirral, the poet tells us – and to a mysterious castle. Gawain is warmly welcomed by the lord, who tells him that he is very close to the Green Chapel where the knight resides, and entreats him to stay for the Christmas ...”

“... England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river is a constant in history and the river is history, of a persuasion that reminds me of childhood favourites such as Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and glossed as ‘A ...”

“... and woke up at seven. The Crossroads Women’s Centre is in a mews behind Kentish Town Road in North London: she arrived early with a sandwich, and napped on the sofa as she waited. She wore a black top edged with black and silver plastic jewels, and her wavy blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail. The English Collective of Prostitutes, formed in 1975 with ...”

“... France. The CIA might have avoided SOE’s disastrous errors if it had read London Calling North Pole by the Abwehr’s Major Hermann Giskes, who had run that operation.In 1956 Sichel moved to Hong Kong, where the agency had its eyes on China and Indonesia. When Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, proposed sending commandos into ...”

“... du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks fourth among US corporations as a generator of air pollution. Among its innovations are nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the ...”

“... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...”

“... lies solely with larger-scale civilisation, whatever metropolitan tolerance is still available in North America, the United Kingdom or the new Europe. Humankind’s inherent variety – its eight thousand languages and hundreds of ethnies – is the equivalent of original sin, good for play but not politics, indulged where absolutely necessary but otherwise ...”

“... inconstancies. Four years later, when civil war presented fresh inconveniences, he moved north and adopted the Calvinism of his new home at Leiden. He stayed there for 15 years. Then, in 1591, believing that the war was about to catch up with him yet again, and finding that the hitherto lax Dutch authorities were taking a disconcerting interest in ...”

“... the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. Before Iraq, the regiment was part of the British f0rce based in North Rhine-Westphalia. Its main function was ‘sitting in Germany boozily waiting for the Russians’ (Akam seems to have a puritanical interest in the drinking habits of soldiers). It’s a cliché that generals are always fighting the previous war, but the ...”

“... that they were ‘coloured’ and rang the police, who came and arrested them. ‘Long live Queen Elizabeth! We like your queen!’ one of the men said hopefully. It was no good. They were all taken to prison and then flown back to Pakistan. In those days, it turned out, you were entitled to remain in Britain if you could escape detection for 24 hours. The ...”

“... do not worship me,’ she wrote. This was unfortunate for her children, only one of whom, Lucy Elizabeth, could be counted on to respond to her erratic displays of affection. Her favourites were among those, seven of twelve, who had died. For the living children her feeling rarely rose even to affection. They had disliked her, she believed, from ...”

“... Here the shape of the future is suggested by Reading Herodotus (2007), a study of Book 5 edited by Elizabeth Irwin and Emily Greenwood, where a group of scholars got together, divided up the text and put the resultant findings through the wringer of collective criticism. Everywhere else there is a real embarras de richesses, a dazzling variety of (not seldom ...”

“... by the petite bourgeoisie (Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot)? I don’t think, as Carey does, that Elizabeth Bowen ‘goes beyond’ Henry James (whom Carey doesn’t seem to like) in her ability to depict inner thought and feeling, and I am unable to make sense of his claim that Lucky Jim represents ‘one of the first attempts in English to describe women ...”

“... Gaggia’s wonderful coffee machine; we sniff the first whiffs of garlic and olive oil from Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food; we hear the first chords of Bill Haley and the Comets. We find, too, the trenchant comments of Richard Hoggart, A.H. Halsey, Anthony Sampson and Michael Young – the Four Evangelists of the 1950s to whom Hennessy ...”

“... the point-to-point, the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this when her narrow foot was measured – size five and a half, but the left slightly longer than the right – though she understood that she would no ...”