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“... Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of another kind – to do with her modern, matter-of-fact tone of voice and her narrowed focus on Jane Austen as the ...”

“... and reproductive capabilities of the communities that remained behind. Africa was transformed. David Livingstone is prominent among the figures credited with ending the slave trade. In fact, pressure for its abolition was already widespread and achieving results before he was born (in 1813) and it had been banned by the governments of the United States and ...”

“... made only three trips to Europe – in 1906, 1909 and 1910. He said that when he returned from France, America ‘seemed a chaos of ugliness’, and later that ‘it seemed awfully raw here when I got back. It took me ten years to get over Europe.’ Whittredge found ‘the forest a mass of decaying logs and tangled brush wood, no peasants to pick up every ...”

“... anywhere in occupied Europe. Despite the fact that the UK is not a member of the eurozone, David Cameron has joined with Merkel in hectoring the recalcitrant Greeks. Not so long ago Cameron, on his first visit to the US as prime minister, declared in an interview with ABC News that, in 1940, Britain was the junior partner to America in the anti-Nazi ...”

“... had been enthusiastically adopted by Gothic as well as Greek revivalists in France.) After completing his frieze at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Flandrin returned to Saint-Germain to paint in the choir and the nave. All of his work there has recently been cleaned as part of a huge restoration project. The general effect is harmonious – or ...”

“... or immerse himself in it for too long, setting out on long walks and trips alone, as his alter ego David Copperfield does in moments of depression when society seems to offer only disappointment. A year after his admission to the Garrick, Dickens resigned from it. In each of the following three decades he would rejoin the Garrick and resign again in protest ...”

“... This poem for Auden lovingly re-creates for him places around Grigson’s summer home in France; and readers of Notes from an Odd Country (1970) will not be surprised. France releases in Grigson moods of gratified expansiveness which mysteriously evade him as soon as he re-crosses the Channel. It can only be at his ...”

“... got his commission as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment (Special Reserve). He arrived in France in July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, but was thought too old for frontline duty, and soon found himself with the battalion transport in Bécourt Wood, near Albert. On 28 or 29 July, a shell exploded beside him, and he lost his memory. In the ...”

“... on Australia and New Zealand more than they need, especially when the complex reactions to him in France and Germany are covered in one broad-brush chapter on ‘Churchill and the Europeans’. The book is invaluable nonetheless, as the first substantial attempt, based on extensive research, to document and explain how the rejected Prime Minister of 1945 ...”

“... way out in front with 189 in the past 35 years, the UK is second (39), then we get Germany (27), France (15), Japan (11), Sweden (6), Norway (2), Finland (1). Even if you rank by prize per head of population, the US remains on top (though Sweden, with home advantage, comes a close second), while Japan, which tends to come first on most of the other quality ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...”

“... than his presumably non-intellectual colleague, Joseph Chamberlain, to see that Germany, not France, was the danger. As late as 1908 Balfour assumed that in a war Britain’s enemy would in the first instance be a power other than Germany. But he did not expect a major war with anybody. ‘There are, so far, no symptoms,’ he assured the young women of ...”

“... the better class of sleeve-note in his record collection will hardly have need of it. The title of David Wulstan’s book Tudor Music promises well. The periodisation of music into ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ is misleading for virtually every country except Italy, and Professor Wulstan’s selection of the Tudor monarchs as setting a time-scale has ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”