“... jobs. The BBC Scots Quair is available on iPlayer in its entirety, a perfect exemplar of what Mark Fisher called the ‘popular modernism’ of 1970s and 1980s television: megaliths, pentatonic theme tune, nudity as edification in its proper period place. I streamed them all end to end – and they are wonderful – in a private replay of what ...”

“... appropriate agreement between personal pronouns and indefinites. The first to do so was Ann Fisher in her New Grammar, a widely used textbook originally published in 1745. ‘The Masculine Person answers to the general Name,’ Fisher explained, ‘which comprehends both Male and Female; as Any Person who knows what ...”

“... a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his arrest. Of course, there are scattered items from ...”

“... the last fingers of leaf that clutch and sink – but no more than Tiresias or Phlebas or the Fisher King or the hyacinth girl (or boy, for that matter) can she be made to organise the rest of the poem into manageable perspective. Like Hamlet in Eliot’s famous reading of it, The Waste Land remains elusive and ‘intractable’; perhaps that is why its ...”

“... Elizabeth puts up against her husband, the Man of Wrath. His potato-pickers, she notes, get a mark and a half a day. ‘The women get less, not because they work less, but because they are women and must not be encouraged.’ Her delight in the weather and the forests would go for nothing without her calm, dry, outrageous defence of herself as a ...”

“... else, came, indirectly, from British readings of top-secret German codes; Anthony Read and David Fisher, in their Operation Lucy, show very well how deviously that system worked, so that top-secret information could be divulged where it mattered, without the source being disclosed or even suspected by the recipient. Whatever the case, Riegner’s report was ...”

“... whimsies, prose-poems, jokes and good advice, wrapped up in pastry parcels. Imagine M.F.K. Fisher deboned, gutted, sliced, rolled around in flour and filo, and cooked in the oven at Gas Mark 7. Crace offers up his stories on a plate: ‘Here is a question for your guests, next time you dine with new acquaintances at ...”

“... sense.Le Guin takes her cue from Woman’s Creation (1975), a book by the anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, which argues that early humans survived mostly by foraging and gathering rather than hunting. From this Le Guin develops her ‘carrier bag theory of evolution’, putting forward the idea that the first cultural device was probably a container rather ...”

“... also has the intensity of first love. For some men, nothing else – human or otherwise – will mark their lives to such an extent. Jeremy Mynott’s Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience is an attempt to put birdwatching back into birding, to reconnect the obsession with rarity and listing to a world that thinks more humanly about ...”

“... which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the World’. Perhaps most intriguing, as described in Mark Purcell’s The Country House Library (2017), is the earl of Northumberland’s ‘Paradise’ room on the visitor-discouraging top floor of the Chapel Tower at Wressle Castle in East Yorkshire. Here the earl seems to have sat and read in something like an ...”

“... for a marriage of any member of the family who was younger than 25. After the quarter-century mark had been reached, things became simpler. All that was required was the consent of the British and Dominion Parliaments. But the year was 1953, and there was a Coronation on the way, and Canon 107 of the Church of England’s 1603 doctrines expressly forbade ...”

“... Xavier, was not active as a painter. He does not mention the debate which has led to a question-mark being placed over both the most famous painting by Goya in London (the portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel in the National Gallery) and the most famous one in New York (the Majas on a Balcony in the Metropolitan Museum).Doña Isabel was acquired for the ...”

“... through the generations. But what with the refusal of some writers to join the enterprise – Mark Twain was an early dropout – and the work schedule of others, the engenderer was compelled to get the family under way. No sooner had he done so, however, than he was upstaged by an ‘old-maid aunt’: a character whom Howells had originally relegated to ...”

“... realism of the Living with Pop exhibition had turned into something else: capitalist realism in Mark Fisher’s sense of the term – not the realistic presentation of capitalism but the recognition that capitalism is the only reality that can ever be imagined. Although the October paintings refer to the German crisis of 1977, they were painted in the ...”

“... Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. Charles Hamilton has left a record of how he went about the business of assembling his characters, picking up a podgy frame here, a pair of loud trousers there.) The author of But for Bunter, indeed, has a lot of fun selecting later celebrities with whom to ...”