“... 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 ...”

“... obliged to believe that Timon of Athens signified a nervous breakdown, and even the very modern Edward Said, in an unexpected aside, speaks of the ‘new spirit of reconciliation and serenity’ in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Such a view clearly needs to be reconsidered in the light of Leontes’s murderous jealousy and Prospero’s habitual ...”

“... In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who followed de Berlanga. Buccaneers eventually gave way to whalers, but the allure of the Galapagos – short on good harbours and fresh water – was never strong. The contrast with other comparably ...”

“... actually an extremely complex period, in which she tried to re-establish her influence over the young James VI, amid interminable negotiations over a compromise that would bring her captivity to an end. Mary’s demise was the result of yet another plot, the Babington Plot of 1586. This was a plan to murder Elizabeth and free Mary, to which Mary famously ...”

“... regulating the breakfast tea. Mrs Melville is the mother of Johnston, a British army officer whose young wife, Helen, is scarcely good enough for her son. They have a child, Jackie, whose nervous disposition makes the rest of them look like Dumbarton Rock, and into this set-up the man from Poland arrives, expecting little. It is a novel in which history keeps ...”

“... would come ‘one who would create the new dance born from the new music’. She thought that her young son Patrick might be that ‘one’. Photography, too, was suspect, and in many photos she wears an expression of placid forbearance: the smile of Mona Lisa under eyes that are appraising. Her portrait and the sensation of her dancing would be rendered by ...”

“... piece, full of abstruse detail, acknowledging the book’s achievement but, in the manner of young scholars everywhere, ticking it off for not drawing on the latest scholarship.Reflecting on this unexpected encounter, I reasoned that I should have expected to meet Frank in that place or another very like it. After a barren, dispiriting year of ...”

“... when an American Navy diver was brutally murdered – an act for which Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a young Lebanese Shi’ite, is currently on trial in Frankfurt. The prospect of an end to the Gulf War may ease Muslim anger but is unlikely to end it. It sometimes seems that militant Islam was spawned by Ayatollah Khomeini, and hence that it is no more than a ...”

“... a scaur of limestone that formed the jamb of a narrow cave. At my feet I noticed a kestrel, a young one, crouching motionless on the grass with wisps of down still clinging to its head. I looked for its parents and saw them perched on two outcrops eighty yards away, as still as their fledgling, pointing at me as intently as compass needles. True, the turf ...”

“... and the sympathetic attention he required. He wouldn’t even let himself be seen with his admirer Edward Heath lest anyone catch on to the fact that he could both paint the poor and be a Tory. In order to create the impression he wanted he lied a great deal (different lies to different people), which he clearly enjoyed. He lied not only about his friends and ...”

“... to the age of being a chaperon (‘By the bye,’ she wrote at 32, ‘as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon, for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like’), Jane Austen kept the question of marrying open in fantasy. In a private nonsense joke she promised to marry the ...”

“... suggestions and justify his frequent frenetic trips to knocking-shop and suburban poke-in. It was Edward Albee who observed, in Zoo Story, that when Americans are young they have dirty pictures as a substitute for the real thing, and when they grow up they have the real thing as a substitute for the dirty pictures. This ...”