“... observed by satellites, have shrunk by 10 per cent since the late 1960s; the average sea level rose between 0.1 and 0.2 metres during the 20th century (as a result of a combination of the thermal expansion of the warmer oceans and the increased run-off of melt-water). The atmospheric concentration of co2 has increased by 31 per cent since 1750; the present ...”

“... Yeats wrote​ ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ in the South of France on 13 January 1939, fifteen days before he died. In the poem, the implacable warrior has ‘six mortal wounds’. As he nears death, he moves among the shades. He is the same solitary figure we know from an early Yeats poem, the warrior who ‘fought with the invulnerable tide’, and from plays such as At the Hawk’s Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer ...”

“... But it increased pensions, supplementary benefits and family allowances. Public expenditure rose from 34 per cent of GDP in 1964-65 to 38 per cent in 1969-70. More went on health, social services and education. Feminist aspirations were acknowledged in the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Though it was private members whose Bills legalised abortion and adult ...”

“... at Hussein’s last rites are the inheritors of the colonial project of 1919, when Britain and France divided the Arab world along unwanted, artificial frontiers and awarded a speck of it to European Jews. Their regimes remain illegitimate, in that their people had no voice in choosing them, and dictatorial, in that they use force to sustain their rule. If ...”

“... then by geography, the two women only meeting once again after the Brownings first set sail for France. And Miss Mitford, of course, was no longer the only one with whom EBB could talk poetry. In later years, the frequency and intensity of the correspondence gradually diminish: the second volume of these letters covers just two years, while the third ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and ‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout the Iliad. ‘Early rose-fingered dawn’ is mentioned so often in Homer for much the same reason a blues singer might tell you he ‘woke up this morning’: in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who ...”

“... Ranelagh, by the Chelsea Hospital, had to be protected by a dedicated Bow Street patrol. Felonies rose by 50 per cent, and now that felons could no longer be shipped to America, more and more of them had to be hanged. John Townsend, taken on as a runner at this time, later looked back nostalgically to this time, when ‘we never had an execution wherein we ...”

“... Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son Walter, after serving a full apprenticeship in the Bristol counting house. Even after moving to London with his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter ...”

“... had authentic Europhile connections and antecedents. The Anglo-German Kötting made films in France and escaped whenever he could to a primitive forest house beside an old Cathar track in the Pyrenees. Barton came to Hastings from Paris, and found her inspiration, as the reviewer Nick Hasted said, in ‘charity shop glamour, Gallic chanteuses, Weimar ice ...”

“... soon as dinner was despatched,’ he wrote of his teenage years, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, I drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’ Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer ...”

“... of his studio only just sold when Degas and His Model appeared in two parts in Le Mercure de France. An as-told-to by a certain ‘Pauline’, written up in the third person by ‘Alice Michel’, who may have been the novelist ‘Rachilde’ (co-editor and co-founder of Le Mercure), it is not so much kiss-and-tell as pose-and-tell. And it is a curious ...”

“... harder to access. I have stood at the site of a Neanderthal shelter at Buoux in the South of France and been hit by an overwhelmingly strong feeling of remoteness, the idea that these people, these similar-but-different humans, were so far from anywhere human and place-like that they must have been hiding from something. Their very existence – we now ...”

“... they held in the Veneto to crush the rebellions in Bologna and Ancona. But, ironically, it was France, a newly formed republic with a constitution committed to defending other republics, which set out to retake Rome for the pope; a French army disembarked at the port of Civitavecchia on 25 April.Thousands gathered to defend the city and the dream of a ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”