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“... slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.’ The last of the novel’s quotations is from Edward Lear, who knew about writing and depression. There was an ink stain on the side of her face. She touched at it, feeling the blackness entering inside her. There was a Young . . . – ...”

“... case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. Tennant spent ...”

“... Can you always count on a bastard for a fancy prose style? It is hard to imagine the fiction of Edward St Aubyn stripped of the cool silver of its style. I am not accusing St Aubyn of being a bastard; I mean that he writes very well about bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness ...”

“... whether it really existed. The Movement (a rather localised, mostly Oxford affair) and the Angry Young Men (more London, more of the theatre) were certainly the inventions of journalists, but they took on a kind of reality when the public was induced to view the young men in terms of those inventions, and also when the ...”

“... distinguished poems here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another ...”

“... missing from courtship and from marriage. This is a position particularly associated with Edward Shorter, whose Making of the Modern Family defends the view that it was capitalism and the rise of industry 150 years after the time described by Quaife which introduced these things into the emotional lives of the mass of the population. No one can read ...”

“... quality, have treated the sculptures as if they were landscapes or people in the street. Two young Englishmen, Stephen Haweis and Henry Coles, who photographed many of them in the early 1900s, preferred to take their pictures at sunset. Some of the images they made, in which detail is buried in deep shadow, are as soft and dark as heavily inked ...”

“... almost hieratically respected by his peers as a grand old man of letters. The egregious banker Edward Clodd, a hanger-on of literary men and a candid friend, who observed of Hardy at the time of his second marriage that he was ‘a great writer but not a great man’, recorded Meredith’s presence at the Omar Khayyam Club dinner, where both Hardy and ...”

“... a golden-haired British gossip columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on himself to remedy her ...”

“... in which intellectual achievement had to be held distinct from the social behaviour expected of a young woman. This cloven existence resulted in a disabling failure of confidence which continues to be (as anyone involved in the teaching of girls will affirm) dispiritingly familiar as a pattern of response for women students. Feminism became a means of dealing ...”

“... to death some 687 foxes in one session.’ But hunters were also early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer with chickens, bought ...”

“... self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive was small, with beautiful eyes), a penniless orphan, ‘different’. Her lover rides a hundred ...”

“... education. From this tolerant, rational household nothing was missing but romance, for which the young De Morgan accordingly pined. In a novel written decades later, he was still hankering after the ‘great silent libraries’, and the ‘intoxicating traditions of ancient learning’, which in the early 1850s fired the imaginations of the Oxford ...”

“... it did not get her into the usual reference books. She was the subject of a biography, in 1959, by Edward Grierson, Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon, which Brian Thompson commends in his bibliography as ‘genial and entertaining’. His own book is as genial as the subject will allow, often extravagantly entertaining, and as shrewd as it is ...”

“... the fresco, was whitewashed in 1820, but the tale of the luckless swine has been preserved in Edward Payson Evans’s history of the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals, first published in 1906 and now reissued. According to Evans, such trials were commonplace, forming part of the fabric of medieval European justice. Pigs accounted for ...”