“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Titian. It also appears as a key location in two of his novels. In What Maisie Knew (1897), young Maisie Farange and her stepfather, Sir Claude, seek shelter from the rain among the Italian Renaissance Madonnas, images (in Sir Claude’s view) full of ‘silly superstition’. In The Wings of the Dove (1902), the mortally ill heiress Milly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”