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“... In his first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, published in 1910, G.K. Chesterton introduced a ‘colossus of crime’ who seemed to have strayed in from Comic Cuts: a giant Gascon called Flambeau who planted dummy pillar boxes in quiet suburbs in the hope of catching the odd postal order, and who ran a fraudulent dairy company without benefit of cows, his agents merely moving the milk containers outside other people’s doors to the doors of his own customers ...”

“... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too ...”

“... of 1986,’ and outlines a programme: presentation of the Domesday facsimile to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Courts of Justice (Her Majesty will not lack for Domesday Books by the end of the year); jousting in Regents Park and Norwich; Domesday weeks in London, Winchester, Norwich and other historic towns; traditional mayor-making ceremony in ...”

“... they wander into Melbourne flophouses, drug dens, the homes of old and new lovers. ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives,’ begins Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), whose narrator, Nora, ushers you to the kitchen table then leaves you to pick your way ...”

“... another instinct. Scott knew that the poet had been a child during Leicester’s courtship of Elizabeth, but he chose to ignore it for the sake of romance. Once Shakespeare became a character, a romantic hero like Rob Roy, known facts were suddenly flexible. Apocryphal episodes like the deer-stealing became, in the wake of Scott, not a means of ...”

“... eyebrows. He had long, thick and even paintbrush-thick eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences ...”

“... more than one cultural tradition flowing into the river of same-sex unions in the British Isles. Elizabeth Brown in the Traditio volume suggests that the distribution of wed-brothers in (the chronicles of) Norman lands may imply a powerful Scandinavian tradition. Brent Shaw cites an account of Celtic homosexual marriage, overlooked by Boswell, preserved ...”

“... the son of a slave.’ Ottoman slavery could be brutal, however, especially if your skin was brown. Hunt makes clear that ‘the forced march of central African and Sudanese captives north across the Sahara desert to slavery among the Ottomans was every bit as brutal and dangerous as the Middle Passage of slaves to the New World.’ But ...”

“... for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at Birmingham University, she specialises in the study of early 19th-century popular protest, and her published work on the Chartist movement has been ‘written in general ...”

“... slave traders preyed and prospered.Of the proponents of free produce, none shines brighter than Elizabeth Heyrick. The Quaker daughter of a Leicestershire clothier, Heyrick achieved some celebrity when her polemical Immediate, Not Gradual Emancipation (1824) sped through multiple editions on both sides of the Atlantic. For Heyrick, the cause of free produce ...”

“... when pork was the capital source of meat for the population. The half-wild, coarse-bristled, dark brown, prick-eared animal of medieval illuminated calendars foraged in the woods that surrounded the outlying pastures of many villages. In autumn and winter, they were driven out by swineherds to fatten on beech mast and acorns: a practice, beset with folklore ...”

“... by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath’. She would have liked her three subsequent novels and book ...”

“... adorned the English throne.’ In the same year, A.L. Rowse dated the preface to The England of Elizabeth (and for Bindoff, Elizabeth was the ‘superb and matchless flower’) ‘Empire Day 1950’. It was left to W.G. Hoskins to commit the equivalent of the Great Parliament Fart of 1605 when he called his economic ...”

“... The walk-on part for Walter Pater palters; the attempt to placate the shade of Savonarola Brown is imprudent when it supposes that all you need to do is lay your finger alongside your nose and mention ‘the brilliance of a young poet called Oscar Wilde’, or mount an exchange like this:     ‘Has anyone ever come across this bearded scribbler ...”

“... would either coax or magic away your doubts.Some hares were also witches, or fairy-folk. Elizabeth Goudge’s astonishing children’s book of 1946, The Little White Horse, written just as the war ended, revels in sugar biscuits and exquisite beauties, and the hare is one the finest beauties of all. They are not, a boy explains, like rabbits: ‘A ...”