“... yet to be explained, eastern England is short of epigraphy from the centuries between Claudius and William the Conqueror. By contrast, in Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, brief stone-cut inscriptions remain in abundance: for instance, in Llansadwrn on Anglesey one celebrates the church’s patron saint, ‘beatus Saturninus’, whose story was of no use to later ...”

“... dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 years: the pre-Raphaelite William Toplis; Mervyn Peake and the Sark Art Group; the New Zealander Rhona Haszard. In 1815, an admirer lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid ...”

“... falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation it no longer represented. An oligarchy of aristocrats and financiers, having hijacked the Commons by means of electoral ...”

“... Isobel Grundy tries to make the case for Secresy on both ideological and artistic grounds. The Cornish-born Fenwick, about whose early life little is known, was active in her twenties and thirties in radical political circles, and along with her husband, John Fenwick, an Irish patriot and member of the London Corresponding Society, became friends with ...”

“... after his death, do not disguise an essential seediness. It is noted by his first biographer, William Cooke, that he ‘took snuff in such quantities as often rendered him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr ...”

“... wool was feeding the Flemish cloth trade. Old mining industries and new ones were booming too: Cornish tin, lead in the Peak District, silver in Durham and Devon. Bell pits for new coal finds were being dug all over the country.The profits and the products of these enterprises helped to make the 13th century a great age of church-building, the heyday of ...”

“... Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore and Christopher Wood. He never met the self-taught Cornish painter Alfred Wallis but supported him and bought his work. It was at the Edes’ dinner table that Moore and Barbara Hepworth had their famous argument about which of them was the first to put a hole in a sculpture. While the Tate resolutely refused to ...”

“... awaiting execution in Jamaica were reprieved to celebrate a royal visit, but whether by then Isaac Cornish had been hanged I never found out.By the later 16th century women, though excluded from the professions, the universities and the church, could own property, and could trade, contract and sue just as men could, provided they were unwed or widowed and, if ...”

“... mentions a childhood friend accidentally drowned, and a brother who may have met his end in a Cornish pool, to account in part for the clergyman-author’s harping on water, and on life underwater. Very little of conventional Christianity gets into The Water-Babies, even in the form of allegory: instead you find a peculiar parallel religion, as Carpenter ...”

“... the psychology of motto-bearing too. Why, one wonders, does Newquay Urban District Council have a Cornish motto which is either obscene or incomprehensible? (Tight-lipped Pine says darkly, ‘Untranslatable at present’: we look forward with bated breath to future editions.) So many and varied are the available fields for a modern lexicographer to plunder ...”

“... Salterns, the family house in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Butts, had been the patron of William Blake, and her father gave her daily lessons in observation in the Blake Room, which housed 34 of his water-colours, engravings, portraits and sketches. In 1905, however, her father died and nine months later the contents of the Blake Room were sold to a ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a ...”

“... Waterloo Bridge and the Adelphi. The destruction of the Adelphi was deemed ‘inevitable’ by the William Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance ...”