“... a slender iron idol, snouted, helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle, painted a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first ...”

“... lifelong penchant for disguise. We are told that he was obsessed with certain books by Robert Louis Stevenson, but no convincing explanations are offered. Why was he so eager to adapt The Suicide Club, Stevenson’s strange tale of a group of men who agree to act as each other’s executioners? Willetts doesn’t tell us. Edward Hyde, a sinister ...”

“... classes, the drift from ‘sensibility’ into animal rights, and the appearance of the first green shoots of environmentalism, are aligned too closely with their modern equivalents. Some of this, admittedly, is slightly tongue-in-cheek. There are splendid asides on the 18th-century origins of fast food, and over whether the characters of Addison and ...”

“... Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts ...”

“... on the island and three-quarters of its adult males were or had been convicts.) Thanks largely to Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987), Tasmania is thought of as a convict hell: a place of ferocious floggings and inhuman confinement. So it would become, but only after the transformations in its economy and polity deliberately effected by that second wave of ...”

“... of Ryan and the governor, Scott Walker; 80 per cent of the women among them oppose Trump. Around Green Bay the population is largely descended from immigrants from the Benelux countries, including the highest percentage of ethnic Belgians in the US, and they are moderates who reliably vote Republican. (Kessler was full of trivia: the town of Holland has ...”

“... got it right: she had seen it all before under the microscope.In​ 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown undertook an investigation into the pollen of Clarkia pulchella, a straggly plant with slender pale purple petals that splay out like chicken feet. Placing the pollen grains in water, he saw through the microscope that they were ‘very evidently in ...”

“... Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in terrorist outrages and unstoppable new viruses, in the city homeless, in ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, in rising world temperatures and evaporating ...”

“... this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s dead. ’Oo is ’e? Robert: My spectre. I had one. Policeman: That’s unusual. I’ope you’re coming ...”

“... and not a review deliberately, and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion ...”

“... In a letter to Robert Liddell dated 12 January 1940, Barbara Pym speaks well of her progress on a new novel, Crampton Hodnet, which she finished later that year, but which has only now surfaced for publication: ‘It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did. Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end ...”

“... you open to specific sorts of ailment. There was speculation about dietary causes or dispositions. Robert Burton’s early 17th-century Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, reckoned that a quartan ague might be brought on by eating too much pork.The category of intermittent fevers remained current in the 19th century, but one much discussed, much feared type ...”

“... my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. It is probably not too romantic to say that that was when my novel Midnight’s Children was really born: when I realised how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded greys of ...”

“... Poems (1932), Reconstruction (1933) – as Georgian, countryside-centred and influenced by Robert Bridges, changing swiftly to Auden’s ‘manifesto manner’ for Difficult Morning (also 1933). I am not sure about this, especially the implicit conflict between country and town: Swingler always seems to inhabit either with ease. Certainly, he inclined ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”