“... Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter ...”

“... York, and into collaborating with the US Embassy. Having proclaimed the ‘American Century’, Henry Luce’s Time took a particular interest in commodity-rich Iran, arguing that the ‘Russians may intervene, grab the oil, even unleash World War Three’. Already determined to overthrow Mossadegh, the British did not take long to exploit the growing ...”

“... Theatricality paid dividends: by 1908 the WSPU had official colours (purple, white and green), badges and banners, a weekly paper, extensive London offices, a network of organisers and branches, and wealthy backers. It also had critics: another militant organisation, the Women’s Freedom League, was founded in 1907 by dissidents unable to stomach ...”

“... once dominated Ireland as the Ascendancy, it’s a rather different story. In Youghal, a slow green avalanche of weeds and brambles has flowed over the Protestant cemetery around St Mary’s collegiate church. Here, Patrick, very bored, sat through services in the family gallery above rows of almost empty pews, and tried to catch baby bats in a ...”

“... the jacket of the recent reissue of a novel of my own, it reproduces the Liverpool Stubbs, ‘The Green Monkey’. But Mr Turner’s subtitle is ‘Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind’ (in which the superfluous comma after ‘pain’ might pass, if one is being polite, for pastiche of Victorian punctuation). It sits ill on a picture not merely ...”

“... time for dinner. ‘We can just have something quick, don’t you know. Maybe cold meat and a nice green salad and a tomato aspic that you can prepare in the morning, before you leave?’‘So, what do you conclude?’ This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: ‘I’m not in the concluding ...”

“... set in a Soho bookies, and Small Holdings (1995), about a privatised park in Palmers Green. After these came a succession of comedies marked by their energy, idiosyncrasy and eclecticism, featuring depressed, phobic or panicked characters. In the decade leading up to H(A)PPY, Barker published five substantial novels, including The Yips and ...”

“... Ms Ortiz Taylor sets up her fiction on much shakier ground – not on the turf of the village green but on the thin crust of earth which protects California from the San Andreas fault. If she also selects a homely simile, it is to pile layer upon layer the pretexts for her heroine’s insecurity: ‘Picture, if you will, a tiny child standing next to her ...”

“... of unwritten rules governing what is appropriate or out of place in a chosen literary style. Like Henry James’s, Iris Murdoch’s style is high, in the sense that she writes about lofty matters – the nature of morality, the reasons for existence, how we should live and love, how we should die – as they arise in stories about the upper middle ...”

“... known; less familiar is the influence he exerted over a younger generation of thinkers including Henry Sidgwick, Dicey and T.H. Green. Arnold Toynbee ended his lectures on the Industrial Revolution with a tribute to Mazzini as ‘the greatest teacher of our age’. Mazzini’s moral language and his insistence on the ...”

“... when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ... auratis’). As G.K. Chesterton ...”

“... Port Ticonderoga. The Chase family wealth was based on buttons. (There is a hidden gibe here at Henry James, who in The Ambassadors would not let Strether tell us what was the embarrassing household article on which the Newsomes of Woolett had raised their fortune: ‘a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use . . . It’s ...”

“... shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen Eighty-Four was ...”

“... of the Victorian civic spirit were progressively undermined by a string of outwardly innocuous green suburbs.’ To prove this, compression, elision and some fancy footwork are needed. Hunt’s difficulty with London is that it was sorting out its governance and its crushing social problems at the same time as it started decanting its population. To ...”

“... crisis had never gone away; memories of the disorder of the Civil War and Interregnum were still green. Peers and Commons were united in their struggle to exclude a Catholic heir to the throne, while the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous ...”