“... form, when it came to beggaring explanation, well before she embarked on Wuthering Heights. While Elizabeth Gaskell was researching her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), someone lent her a ‘most extraordinary’ packet containing an ‘immense amount of manuscript’ written in a hand impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass. These ...”

“... in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the North particularly. Act I, Scene I ends like this: Leonard: Where yer going? Oakroyd (at door): Down south. Exit to triumphant music from the gramophone. And earlier: Oakroyd: I’d like to go down south again. I’d like to have a look at … oh well ...”

“... war itself often had little impact. When in July 1943, after the Allies had driven the Axis out of North Africa and crossed the Mediterranean, Channon said to Laura Corrigan, ‘Isn’t it wonderful about Sicily?’ she replied: ‘Sicily who?’One difference​ between the two diaries is particularly striking: Nicolson writes about people with almost ...”

“... over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s 80th birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with everyone Jocelyn has known or worked ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom ...”

“... privacy was largely left by the common law to the law of trespass. If, as Lord Camden said in the North Briton case, the eye cannot trespass, the answer was to build a wall. If you had no property you had no privacy. The law was no better advanced when in 1990 the actor Gorden Kaye, who was seriously ill in hospital when journalists conned their way into his ...”

“... life, which became much more active and shared once they moved to Regent’s Park Terrace in North London in 1956. But, as his children recognised more readily than Pritchett himself, there were several years during which they were a dysfunctional family. Pritchett’s friend Al Alvarez said of him that ‘he was addicted to writing like some people are ...”

“... up with terms for the new landscape as snappy as ‘left’ and ‘right’. The University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill Expert Survey, for instance, has since 1999 been plotting European party ideologies on a double axis – one left/right, the other calibrated with what it calls the ‘GAL-TAN dimension’, standing for ...”

“... of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely spiritual and devotional work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire’. More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and ...”

“... Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took English classes (she had the best attendance) and she was due to graduate that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”

“... lost his childhood.Before leaving for Palestine, Joe took a flat at Regent House, Zamalek, just north of the Gezira Club. This was the most popular residential area for the Inglizi (two nearby blocks of flats were known as Elephant and Castle), so rents were high and, since their Egyptian owners tended to remove most of the furniture and rugs, the flats ...”

“... Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern counties, and one notional, made up of the 26 remaining counties which had Nationalist majorities. Following de Valera’s return at the end of 1920, and various peace feelers, a truce was called from 11 July 1921 and, after preliminary discussions ...”

“... For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite ...”

“... novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have ...”