“... he would be tormented by ‘desire to copulate with a bronze bottom without copulating with a brown face’. Woolf, heterosexual (though he thought most women ‘extraordinarily ugly’ when naked), had a mild expatriate affair, and probably enjoyed work and play more than he lets on. He does mention specifically the delights of hard riding (‘it is ...”

“... and journalism – into auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the national ...”

“... press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But this was as nothing to the squalor and piety which marked the Year of Grace 1955. In August, Margaret turned 25 and tried to pick up the threads with ...”

“... with bright black eyes as it sucked its bit of bread. Such a funny little complete face – rich brown complexion and miniature roman nose. And then its mother lifted it up, that it might see the rose-decked altar, where the priests were standing. Images like these stock the novelist’s larder. Eliot became adept in finding ways of representing the people ...”

“... left in England, Waugh would say: he can tell the exact figure by checking the sales of books by John Betjeman and P.G. Wodehouse, or by the turn-out for a West End revival of The Pirates of Penzance. And, out of town, there are still a few pockets of decency and calm; there are still a few country churches where the priest uses the word ‘God’ more often ...”

“... of other lands? Gavin Young quotes him as saying: ‘I’d risk my life to save a black man or a brown one. I’m not so sure that I’d do that for a white.’ But perhaps that is just the sort of thing people say in interviews, over the Earl Grey tea, as the hyenas howl: he keeps a flat in Chelsea and would presumably help his neighbours in a fire. Down ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 the Lincoln Center. In the new harbour near the World Trade Center I saw a piece by Trisha Brown which involved four women repeating a series of accumulating movements while lying on individual rafts, gradually getting more and more out of synch as the rafts floated off in different directions. In some nearly abandoned old theatre with a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... 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 ...”