“... in close conjunction with the Church. Only Oxford and Cambridge had medical schools. The training took between six and nine years, involved placements in Salerno and Paris, and incorporated not just botany, anatomy and pharmacology, but astrology, geometry, music and algebra. Astrology and geometry were essential given the importance of the stars to ...”

“... on the Baro-Kano railway (you couldn’t make this up). He was usually in Nigeria, where he never took his family, and died when Pamela was 12. The family background belongs on the slippery edges of social status; Amy’s family were vaguely theatrical – her father had been a manager for Henry Irving – and thought of themselves approvingly as ...”

“... be displaced by the US without the risk of Moscow retaliating by other means. Smaller states took advantage of rivalry between the superpowers to enhance their independence, but the break-up of the Soviet Union meant that this was no longer possible. One of the more rational reasons advanced by Saddam for invading Kuwait in 1990 was that the freedom of ...”

“... less surprisingly, racehorses. Mazeppa became one of the most successful of the hippodramas that took London, Paris and New York by storm in the 1820s. Part circus, part successor to the elaborate manège routines carried out by elite groups of royal horses, these equine spectacles combined melodramatic stagecraft and inspired horsemanship. After one ...”

“... of American magazines and the man on the omnibus had ‘some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever’. In Crossroads, a man ‘in the vitamin business’, Franzen’s idea of a regular Joe, buys ‘the recent Mailer, the recent Updike’. Free from the ‘total electronic distraction of our time’, Franzen’s people keep their minds on higher ...”

“... of a philandering seducer more than twice her age, who was, to boot, a fellow Fabian. Reeves took to stalking London drawing-rooms, metaphorical horsewhip at the ready. Perennial founts of sanity and decency such as the Daily Mail and the Spectator denounced Wells’s sexually libertarian views and hounded him for his disgraceful behaviour. He compounded ...”

“... Surveyor and his assistants stayed for more than six months to make drawings, and some time later took 11 stones to Calcutta; nine of these were shipped to the East India Company collection in London. Almost three decades passed. Then in 1845 Sir Walter Elliot of the Madras Civil Service travelled to Amaravati. The mound had almost entirely vanished, and ...”

“... her Highland divertissement was an artistic version of a fling. In May 1925 she writes to him I took your key, read ¾ of Mrs Dalloway, it is very rapid, interesting, and yet I feel in that book all human beings only puppets. Virginia’s brain is so quick that sometimes her pen cannot catch it, or it is I who is slow. However I shall pursue the book to the ...”

“... his reinstatement on the Navy List is promised. Despite such plots O’Brian’s Aubrey novels, as John Bayley has said in this paper, are ‘emphatically not adventure stories, or the sort of mechanical marine thrillers which sprang up in the wake of C.S. Forester’. For one thing, delicacy and generosity of feeling are constant themes in O’Brian’s ...”

“... Princess Alice, including the husband and two children of Elizabeth Stride. Her family gone, she took to drink, went on the streets. She became one of the victims of Jack the Ripper – the kind of ominous coincidence that fiction needs to avoid if it is to be plausible. Life itself can afford to be more extrovert. So can Sinclair, who has no truck with ...”

“... enacted by costumed players in a crystal-clear space’. It was painted for – one might say took place at – the Salon of 1834. By then many paintings were designed primarily for the great annual public exhibitions and some of them exclusively for these, with no appropriate final destination. Special shows of one or two works of art, usually large ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... of convention. That said, the books are hardly subversive. Father is in the Navy, where John and Roger expect to follow him. Mate Susan, caring and cooking, is training herself for middle-class wifehood. Her mother, though reared in the Australian outback, is (unlike Ransome’s remarkable second wife) very content to employ servants. Through Slump ...”

“... a sturdier strain of poetry than either the Georgian mode prevalent at the time Edward Thomas took to writing verse (1914-17) or the Modernism that displaced it. (A bit further on, there’s another essay which pairs Thomas with Philip Larkin, and clears both of them of the charge of giving in to nostalgia.) The neglect of Thomas and Frost, Edna Longley ...”

“... or less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ...”