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“... were all 4 seene in bed together at one tyme.’ The documentation is scanty, and we have no Jacobean tabloids to furnish us with further juicy details – ‘Immigrants in Group Sex Romp!’ – but one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... Time moves​ in a mysterious way. Wolf Hall, the first instalment of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, appeared more than a decade ago. Its 650 pages covered the years from roughly 1500 to 1535. Three years later came Bring Up the Bodies, which in 410 pages created a tight tragic narrative about Cromwell’s part in the fall of Anne Boleyn over the single year 1535-36 ...”

“... majority of the population still live in houses’. Flats were not popular, nor were town centres. No Englishman would live over a shop if he could help it. It was to the country and the suburbs that the English retreated, to houses which, Muthesius noted with approval, were ‘to live in, not to look at’, practical and unpretentious. If the nation lacked a ...”

“... wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious phrase must, as Stourton supposes, allude to his infidelities. The risk would have been great, even had Clark been travelling by plane. Soon after posting the letter he began an affair with Barbara Desborough. Later, he was ...”

“... His first piece, for piano, was nine bars long, most of it a quote from a music-hall song called ‘Ma Normandie’. He seems to have found the sounds of the cafés and nightclubs more alluring than the classical tradition, and a ‘Fantaisie-Valse’ and a ‘Valse-Ballet’ followed.By the mid 1880s Satie was excelling at the vie de ...”

“... Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all. But the next few years promise no end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and ...”

“... a passing resemblance to a small eastern deity, but even so it’s something of a lurch from this hall full of serene statuary, including the head of a 13th-century Buddha carved from sandstone, to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his lolling tongue in close proximity to Lyndon Johnson’s bottom (‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’, 30 April ...”

“... on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They were the offside,’ the Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir said. ‘They never was known … to anybody.’By the time record companies got round ...”

“... peg its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape seeds. No matter. The poor farmers and small merchants from the nation’s heartland grasped the essential point: Bryan was challenging a rich, powerful, Eastern establishment in their name. Before the age of microphones, Bryan’s voice reached every cranny of the ...”

“... he would invent ridiculous sources for it – a delicatessen, a Pullman railroad car, a Tammany Hall club – while in his stories and poems he would always inflict on his leading character, who was always himself, a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse ...”

“... on hard benches, with bowed heads, resting, enjoying their £2 concessionary rides: they offered no recognition of this moment of national bereavement. The immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs ...”

“... it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the ...”

“... War and Peace or that Anglo-Saxon chronicle so much beloved by Russians, The Forsyte Saga? Alas, no. Art does not work like that, even with a writer as talented, industrious and conscientious as Paul Scott. Art abhors a vacuum, and Scott’s sequence seems to be founded upon a wholly negative principle: the careful avoidance of anything romantic, dashing or ...”