“... sailors and pilots during the war. Divorce cost three guineas, and the government paid. When Henry Betterton, a barrister who had been the Conservative MP for Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire since 1918, was appointed chair of the special committee on legal aid and legal advice in 1944, the argument for legal aid had virtually been won. A compassionate ...”

“... most of it is. Even Jane Dunn finds it hard to tell things apart, at one stage mixing up Reggie Green-Wilkinson, White’s first husband, with the fictional version Archie Hughes-Follett as she relates the story of their wedding night (the same in both life and novel), when Antonia, having been warned by her mother that something so appalling was going to ...”

“... its own system of beadles and watchmen charged with maintaining order and apprehending miscreants. Henry Fielding’s Bow Street Runners, the first detective force, were introduced in 1749, and individuals could employ private thief-takers (often former thieves) to catch criminals and put them before a magistrate, but it took the success – and commercial ...”

“... agent sent a report claiming that ‘German troops in Norway were training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits and had been heard practising on Scottish bagpipes.’ Operation Columba was conceived and run by a raggle-taggle band of secret service officers, pigeon-fanciers, aristocratic animal lovers and soldiers, who didn’t always work well ...”

“... the first history of Dorset’s birds. Of the other characters involved, the Earl of Ilchester was Henry Stephen Fox-Strangways (1787-1858), who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St ...”

“... It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie wishes desperately not to belong to. She ...”

“... of Plantagenet Kings. C.H. Sisson finds himself in the same company in the bracing reign of Henry VIII. Philip Larkin joins Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen for the final flowering of the Great War. Tom Paulin has denounced Mr Baker’s attempt to establish a single English tradition as the work of a ‘blood and soil’ nationalist. Jonathan Clark has ...”

“... a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident ...”

“... done so, it is not clear that, left to themselves, they have left themselves much to say. It was Henry Sidgwick who best exposed the pretension. And it was Sidgwick who, from well beyond the grave, did as much as anyone to keep the subject out of Cambridge. Yet he was not an obvious enemy. In the 1860s he had lectured on philosophy and political theory in ...”

“... office. Both were by Emil Nolde. Brecher (1936) was a typically Noldean seascape, dark blue-green breakers against a glowing red sky. The other painting was less ominous: a garden picture from 1915, Blumengarten (Thersens Haus). Emil Nolde’s ‘Blumengarten (Thersens Haus)’ (1915). This and ‘Brecher’ (below) were the two paintings that hung ...”

“... also part of their appeal. Verrey’s in Regent Street was a place to see and be seen. It had dark green panels and small square tables with red-shaded candles. The ceiling had silver arches and there were so many mirrors on the walls that diners were reflected multiple times. One restaurant critic, Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, called it a ‘rendezvous of the ...”

“... or when Lady Layard translated a treatise on lace-making and her husband, Sir Austen Henry Layard, helped to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty ...”

“... ends with a parody, an affectionate rewrite of Sir Gawain called ‘The Seventh Knight and the Green Cat’, which closes with a volte-face. Whatever Mr Brownjohn has to say he says ‘truthfully’: it is hard to think of many writers at once so lacking in blague and yet so unboring. In substance, many of these poems come close to the ...”

“... ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading educational reformer after the First World War, remembered the schooling he had received in the 1870s by noting that music had beenthe reluctant substitute for cricket, all the more bitter because it carried the suspicion of an unmanly ...”

“... d’esprit, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’, he was playing with the same idea which Henry James would explore elaborately in his story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. In both cases a narrator awaits, hopes and seeks for the arrival of the true thing, the Big Experience. And the awareness of looking is itself the indication that it will not be ...”