“... no use for hardihood,’ James says, ‘would be contemptible.’ In his own life, Michael has little time for the priesthood of the life force. He doesn’t believe in it; implicitly, he has ‘been preaching against literary vitalism all his career’. His only concession to life in extremis is an annual hunting trip, and in the opening chapter he ...”

“... were given titbits to eat by their Irish tenants, who felt sorry for them. Like children in an Arthur Ransome or C.S. Lewis novel, they rambled unnoticed around the great house and were given to taking off on their bicycles up the main road to the nearby town. It is well known in the world of fairytale and post-Freudian analysis that it is not a good thing ...”

“... their descendants have been regularly proposed in the US since the 18th century but there has been little comparable debate in the UK. Only with the growth of a significant Black population in Britain in the second half of the 20th century has the question of slavery and its legacies been brought into public view. The children of the Windrush wanted to know ...”

“... On a cycling holiday in Scotland A.C. Benson went to meet Arthur Balfour at Whittingehame. The prime minister was out practising on his private golf course. They saw him ‘approaching across the grass, swinging a golf club – in rough coat and waistcoat, the latter open; a cloth cap, flannel trousers; and large black boots, much too heavy and big for his willowy figure ...”

“... for nearly five hundred continuous years, were celebrated in magazines like Country Life, and Arthur Bryant was not the first to recognise its bay as ‘the loveliest in England’. Eton College used to send its scouts to Tyneham for their annual summer camp. The Times photographed the harvest here in August 1929, and spread the Baldwinite result – a ...”

“... Dr O’Brien is mistaken about this and would have realised his mistake if he had travelled a little in the Arab world and talked to a few more Arabs. It’s a strange sort of siege when the garrison frequently attacks the besiegers and is never attacked itself. Since 1967, Israel has attacked or invaded six Arab countries ...”

“... are allies, collaborators, members of a self-selecting elite or avant-garde; and yet there is very little interaction between them. None of the figures touches his neighbour; they may abut, overlap, hide behind one another, but there is no contact between them. It is almost as if they can’t wait for the sitting (and the standing) to be over, so that they may ...”

“... Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe. Both Russian and American culture were warped and disfigured by the contest, however: one side by continuing Stalinist paranoia and a resumption of the purges and cultural repression that had eased during the war ...”

“... of the French Revolution. Eastern palaces had been transformed into graveyards and, in Volney’s little book, ruins became teaching aids in a series of lectures on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he ...”

“... with many finely discriminated senses, as the SOED helpfully makes clear. And whereas persons of little culture might plump for SOED 5 (‘to desire, wish for’) in its post-1706 usage, Willetts is evidently much attached to the original Middle English usage of SOED 4: ‘to suffer the want of; to need, require; to stand in need of (something salutary, but ...”

“... if Paris hadn’t existed. Robb presents us initially with a country that in some ways had changed little since Roman times. Until well into the 19th century, France was less a nation than a set of tribes that inhabited a vast, seemingly empty space and spoke numerous mutually incomprehensible languages. Although things had begun to change, especially after ...”

“... unique among well-studied objects, though a similar visitor appears in Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (asteroid 4923), which imagines an apparently abandoned cylindrical spacecraft entering the solar system. In Clarke’s novel, plucky astronauts make a close-up inspection of Rama and confirm its artificial nature, though its origin and the ...”

“... handwritten revisions and instructions with which Constable besieged Lucas: ‘two near crows a little too large’; ‘put a little smoak about the Cottages’. (After Constable’s death, the quality of the prints collapsed.) Artists could grow quickly famous – and wealthy – via prints of their paintings; Joshua ...”

“... is not a seducer at all, but a thoroughly likeable senior railway engineer who has little idea how important his visit has been for Cousin Phillis. He sees her as a Sleeping Beauty, quite unaware, and promises himself with some complacency that he will come back from Canada, where he is bound on a new railway assignment, ‘and waken her to my ...”

“... the judicial ark, a role which hardly seems to square with his breezy, sanguine public figure, so little suggestive of an axe-grinding zealot. But readers seeking the answer to this puzzle will find themselves scarcely the wiser. It was little or nothing to do, apparently, with the fact that his father, a naval ...”