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“... boat, the Ardent Spirit. When James gently but none the less patronisingly dismissed Jane Austen as ‘knowing no more of her process than the brown bird that sings on the orchard bough’, he forgot or ignored the fact that a highly skilled and instinctive artist may know very little about how his task came to be chosen, but a very great deal ...”

“... some theologians in the Fifties to works such as The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature: C.S. Lewis, for example, condemned ‘merely aesthetic’ interpretation of the Bible as a way of dodging its religious claims. But Lewis was not a Biblical scholar, and it would be hard to find a single example of anyone engaged in ...”

“... really change in 1910. Looking back there are two significant lines of descent. On the one hand is Jane Austen, who certainly cared about clothes and talked about them in her letters, but who is interestingly uninterested in them in her novels; more than that, she is positively hostile. Women who talk about clothes mark themselves out as stupid, vulgar or ...”

“... interests of real estate and cash-poor councils were taken into consideration, and that reason is: Jane Jacobs says no. This injunction can be traced back to the epiphany Jacobs experienced as a freelance journalist in Philadelphia in the mid-1950s when she visited new housing estates and old ‘slums’ with the city planner Edmund Bacon. Up to that ...”

“... victim to the enemies of promise. I fear he will never be found, as hoped, ‘on the same shelf as Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, Hazlitt and Lewis Carroll’. He was quite lucky in life, though. He employed for many years a faithful manservant and outstanding cook called Reginald Gaskin, a kind of gay Jeeves. There was also ...”

“... about. As rewritten for John Major’s times, England’s epic is all regression. Gilgamesh is Lewis Carroll in disguise: the Queen of Hearts raves uninterruptedly through 11 sanguinary, doom-sodden chapters, then at the end Alice pops out and tells everybody to behave. Where does Selbourne’s stance fit in relation to ongoing international debates about ...”

“... climbs a tree to protect it from chainsaws. Theo at Fairmile a few months ago wore a composite Lewis Carroll creation, a mushroom with a Mad Hatter’s hat, and a caterpillar snaking round his body. Ex-circus performers Rosie and Emma perform their tricky arts on the walkways. ‘Protesters are artists,’ says Ratty, a tunneller, ‘trying to make this ...”

“... good, he found, for grandiose magic lantern effects. Presumably it was decided early on by Jane Stevenson or Cape (perhaps both) that, given the wealth of filmed interviews, surviving correspondence with racy friends and the ever interesting state of his health tested by remarkably extensive travels, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye could be ...”

“... Danby, an illegitimate cousin. Fred truculently farms the estate. He and Lilia have two children, Jane and Maud. Cousins, of course, bring with them a plentiful supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could have done more to convince us that the formidable Lady Waters will play a decisive role in the lives of the protagonists of To the North (1932) than the ...”

“... Matter supporters’. The Telegraph, the Express and the Daily Mail all reported that displays at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton would carry out ‘historical interrogation’ of ‘Austen’s tea drinking’ and its links to slavery. This, the papers solemnly declared, was ‘woke madness’. In fact, Austen’s father was a trustee of an Antigua sugar ...”

“... the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of ...”

“... by croup. In 1874 John Yeats took his family away from the Pollexfens to London. A sixth child, Jane, was born the following year, on Jack’s fourth birthday, but died within months. Five years later, when money was very short, Jack was sent to Sligo, to be brought up by his grandparents. When Susan Yeats died on 3 January 1900, her daughters were in their ...”

“... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an ...”

“... English literature, radical reactionaries to a man (Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis) though not, as it happens, to a Bloomsbury woman. The advent of William Morris was the point where this ambiguous lineage finally joined the modern world. Morris was of course quite as much a neo-medievalist as Carlyle or Ruskin; but his achievement was to ...”