“... on the Ministry of Technology. (Ah! The DEA! The Ministry of Technology! The tantrums of George Brown! Later that same day, Crossman dined with ‘Wedgwood Benn’ to discuss the menace of Radio Caroline. There is a decomposing madeleine wedged between every leaf of these diaries, which I have just reread.) In his lenient and chivalrous biography of ...”

“... where Larkin lived’, to see: a man in a belted mac returning from work – a respectable man: brown glasses and trilby hat – stop under one of the cavernous chestnuts,    fling his briefcase heavily into the branches, crouch in a hail of conkers, chase them hither and yon in the cobwebby shade,   pocket them, then disappear in the gloaming ...”

“... that the novelists often availed themselves of single traditional physiognomic correspondences: brown or black eyes are the sign of physical or moral strength; blue eyes belong to gentle characters; ‘strong characters are almost always dark-haired’ while ‘fair hair is often assigned to characters of an essentially gentle nature’ although it is ...”

“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”

“... insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he seems, like many famous people who start their careers almost as child prodigies, to have suffered burn-out of his private ...”

“... Berlioz’s full conversion took place after hearing a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride. As John Rice argues here, a number of arias in les Danaïdes are written in a simple and affective melodic style reminiscent of parts of Orfeo and La Rencontre imprévue, and several of their contemporaries thought of the two composers in the same breath. Salieri ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”

“... years later by Chesterton, who assimilated the theological to the criminal in the tales of Father Brown. ‘Chesterton always performs the tour de force of proposing a supernatural explanation [for a crime] and then replacing it, losing nothing, with another one from this world,’ wrote Borges, another master of otherworldly propositions, who once related ...”

“... and a farcical comedy of a suspiciously British hue. ‘Let’s just say Doll was beholden to his brown trousers.’ The play of British and German throughout is notable: I haven’t been confronted with so much German in ages in an English setting, not since the brazen Audi ads of the 1980s. Much of this is associated with Doll; the endless Nazi ranks and ...”

“... with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century’. The pressure of this last question – or indeed of all three – is not to be collapsed into shorthand of the kind: ‘Wasn’t English landscape bound to be an exercise in ...”

“... hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered to liberate the National Liberal Club from its debts, hoping that he would in return be ...”

“... In Hamnet, O’Farrell has Agnes dwell on the labour and violence behind the making of a pair of John Shakespeare’s animal-skin gloves (‘She thinks of the tools in the workshop, for cutting and shaping, pinning and piercing’). Lucrezia’s embroidery, which she stabs at performatively in Alfonso’s presence, has, she knows, a ‘wrong side’ as well ...”

“... catastrophe to human sin.* Others took more optimistic lessons from scripture. The geologist John Woodward thought Protestant industriousness would save mankind from sin and restore to the soil the natural fertility lost in the Flood. Barnett argues that the secularising impulses of the 18th century – which separated human history from the natural deep ...”

“... her house with a trio of uninvited guests: Mr Vercueil, a white down-and-out, and Bheki and John, two teenagers on the run from the Police. Bheki is the son of Florence, Elizabeth’s black housemaid (Florence also has two baby daughters significantly named Hope and Beauty). But Florence has come to realise that, in a country where children have learnt ...”