“... in Mein Leben as one of Wagner’s mistresses in his years of exile. But in Mein Leben there is little of the dark side. What we find instead is a very characteristic early 19th-century hero: a kind of Lucien de Rubempré, leaping from misfortune to extravagant fortune and then falling again, running at full pace up and down metaphorical mountains (as well ...”

“... is the history of the Templars, whose legendary Grand Masters were to Languedoc and Provence what Arthur is to Wessex. One aspect of Durrell’s ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in ...”

“... the politics of an earlier era. Martin Pugh’s own monograph on the Fourth Reform Act,* too little noticed when it was published, is a case in point, and one can go back to that book in illustrating his method, using electoral reform as a special case. From 1867 Britain operated a system of household suffrage, at first confined to boroughs but extended ...”

“... In Lady Oracle, the Canadian heroine takes refuge in the Roman Campagna after a faked suicide. Little of consequence happens to her there, and the emphasis is placed almost exclusively on the gradual unfolding of the episodes of her earlier life. In Bodily Harm, a woman journalist arrives in a Caribbean island to write a travel feature. But an intrigue ...”

“... at the voluble impudence of some passages, the suddenness of the comic assault. But there is very little innocent laughter in this book. The prevailing tone is the giggling of the vicious, beside which the crackling of thorns under a pot is a pleasantly musical sound; and it is a melancholy thing to see, in the space of a hundred and eighty pages, a writer ...”

“... raises no objections; and in no time the pair are married. Adamson’s life, however, is very little changed by the gratification of his greatest desire. Husband and wife continue to live at Bredely; Adamson continues to feel a less than free and accepted member of the family, and finds himself performing the same duties as before. Plans for a return to ...”

“... at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge ...”

“... at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness. Newbolt’s is a close little face, the small mouth primly clenched over an aggressively cloven chin, the brows knitted in a frown which seems to tell less of imperial visions than of inner worries and embarrassments. It is the kind of face to whose owner a bank manager might think ...”

“... ingredients and trigger reactions in the nervous system, including ‘a tingling freshness, a little frisson of an electric sparkle’. Aldehydes were still novel in the perfume industry of the 1920s, and certainly in the amounts used in Chanel No. 5, and were thought by aficionados to contribute the perfume’s characteristic champagne quality ...”

“... which first aired on 24 November 1962, presented by David Frost. With the cancelling of that show little more than a year later, ostensibly on the grounds that it interfered with the BBC’s duty of impartiality in the run-up to the 1964 election, the heyday of anti-establishment comedy was already over. Yet its influence on British radio and television has ...”

“... manuscript: a tissue of clues, linguistic and palaeographical.The language of the poems is full of little geolocating tells, which reveal that the manuscript was copied in a dialect of Middle English specific to the South-East Cheshire and North-East Staffordshire border. (The poet’s dialect is thought to be from a ...”

“... comparable to Pinkerton’s. Furthermore, they worked chiefly on divorce and libel cases, taking little part in the investigation of crime, and so didn’t figure much in the press. In fiction, however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the ...”

“... with the supernatural. Rather, he believed in a divine universe whose perpetual unfolding left little room for demons. His heliocentric scheme came from observation, but also formed an image of the Holy Trinity with God as the sun, Christ as the stars and the Holy Spirit as the intervening space. Kepler’s astronomy did not seek to disenchant the ...”

“... by planting up corridors to join existing woods together, because (apart from birds) there is little evidence they can use them. As for planting trees in an attempt to stop climate change, given the size of Britain, ‘exhorting people to plant trees to sequester carbon dioxide is like telling them to drink more to hold down rising sea levels’. And ...”

“... amateurs, they developed professional skills at a time when university professionals took little interest in vernacular scholarship. They mostly earned their livings in other clerkly trades, as journalists, parliamentary reporters or lawyers. In their spare time they collected 16th and 17th-century books and manuscripts, learned booty which was much ...”