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“... era; the best work naturalises what’s alien in other times and places, makes its readers feel at home. If you want to experience the otherness of the Victorians, don’t read George Eliot, read Charlotte Yonge. Stafford makes me taste the alienation and disenchantment of the mid-century zeitgeist as – for example – her contemporary Eudora Welty ...”

“... in Valhöll (‘the halls of the slain’), where the entertainment wouldn’t be praising the Lord, but fighting and feasting, and where the undead heroes would be raised to life every evening to fight again the next day. Nor would this be eternal life: gods, heroes and Valhöll itself would be extinguished in the fires of Ragnarök. As the Old Norse poem ...”

“... you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you see a garden which has nothing in it but an abandoned car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books. Gardening as an activity, however, is rather more complex than the gardens ...”

“... English knight from St Albans, claimed to have travelled the world for 34 years before returning home in 1358 to compose his Book. The work survives in some three hundred manuscripts in ten languages, followed by a robust print life. It was known to Columbus, Leonardo and John Dee, influenced cartographers, and inspired London stage plays. Yet no one knows ...”

“... he died believing in God and in the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church. He had not, as Lord Chancellor, imprisoned and interrogated Lutherans and sent six reformers to be burned at the stake, just so that he might die for slender modern scruple. The drained, contemporary view of More, which admires not what he believed but how he believed – his ...”

“... to extend her studies, chiefly – it seems – so that she wouldn’t be forced to go back home. In 1926 she wrote to a friend from her parents’ house: ‘Here I am plunged in the middle of Benares brass life, and Japanese screens … I am too depressed by the hideousness … and the bric-à-bracs.’ At the Slade, she was part of what Tonks declared ...”

“... places for different reasons. In Ramsay’s poem, a young man is leaving both his West Highland home and his girl behind, perhaps because he intends to join the British army or navy. In Nicol’s painting, the couple are migrants reluctantly quitting the old world for the new, perhaps because their landlord has evicted them. In the ...”

“... is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess Townshend’s Raynham ...”

“... contemporary idealism (empire as duty, racial superiority as obligation, war as necessity), with Lord Cromer cited in 1908 to warn against baser motives: ‘We need not always enquire too closely what these peoples ... themselves think best in their own interests ... But it is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly [on the basis of ...”

“... future publisher of the Yellow Book, by asking fortuitously: ‘Johnnie darling, won’t you come home with me?’ Even when he’s not quoting directly, White’s stories and statistics are chiefly drawn from contemporary sources. Here, then, is an attempt at a fresh portrait of 19th-century London, describing its evolution from the ...”

“... be about, what non-fabulous reality lurks behind it or in its sights? The Lamb, also known as the Lord of the Mines, is the blind ruler of an underground realm beneath a ruined industrial landscape. ‘There had been a time,’ we read, ‘when these deserted solitudes were alive with hope, excitement and conjecture on how the world was to be ...”

“... At the outbreak of World War One, the British Government decided to postpone Home Rule for Ireland, which had just been enacted. Despite this, many Nationalists as well as Unionists enlisted in the British Army. Some radical Nationalists came to believe that action was needed to revive national sentiment. The Easter Rising of 1916 failed, but the execution of most of its leaders, followed two years later by an attempt to impose conscription on Ireland, led to a radicalisation of Nationalist opinion ...”

“... He learned little at the dames’ schools to which he was sent, and for a year was taught at home by his mother, but that ‘made him squirm’ and he pulled horrible nervous faces. So he was sent to King’s College Choir School as a ‘mouldy day-bug’, and here the chaplain, Eric Milner-White, is said to have interested him in religion. Michael ...”

“... C.S. Lewis was born in 1898, the son of a Belfast solicitor. He was educated first at home, then in England at a preparatory school, at Malvern (for one term only), and by a private tutor. So to Oxford. It was 1917. Lewis had volunteered, and he was in effect an officer cadet, soon in ‘barracks’ at Keble. He returned to Oxford after a brief spell on the Western front, where he was wounded, and at Oxford he stayed until 1954 when he was appointed to a chair in Cambridge ...”

“... and the birth of an heir. In the early hours of the next morning, two miles from the marital home, the lover is found dead in his car. He has been shot through the ear at close range. Later that day the husband lights a bonfire near the house: in this bonfire he tries to burn, among other things, a pair of gym shoes and a blood-stained golf-stocking. He ...”