“... 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 ...”

“... in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the ...”

“... what housewives make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have stepped so easily or so ...”

“... every literate citizen of Red Cloud or scholar at the university – most notably Bernice Slote, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Mildred Bennett and Elizabeth Moorhead. Her earlier biographers had all been men who shielded her gallantly from any disrepute and in some cases – E.K. ...”

“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”

“... plot is taken from Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan, to which Fante was introduced by his sometime agent Elizabeth Nowell in 1936. The title comes from a passage in which Hamsun’s narrator compresses the story of his doomed love affairs into a fable about a ‘lord’ who loves two women – a compliant ‘maid’ and ‘another’: This other he loved as a ...”

“... mole, she begs for the boy to come and rescue her. He is killed on the way, but a huge, red-brown dog arrives and rips the scoundrel’s neck out. It’s hard not to look for political allegories, the killer dog as an expression of the Revolution which is itself part of some sort of savage unconscious. Teffi must have been aware of similarly dark ...”

“... about himself he is. A really good novelist performing this act is always a joy to watch. Elizabeth Bowen did it brilliantly, though much more ruthlessly than Amis ever did, in the character of Anna in The Death of the Heart. But that special sort of act is absent from You Can’t Do Both – an apposite title because up to now Amis always has. I ...”

“... have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at Tate Britain (until 24 February), is even more striking when you consider that Rossetti, despite having spent several years first at Sass’s Drawing School ...”

“... larger-than-life theatricality of its anecdotes and style. The episode when Charke, alias ‘Mr Brown’, becomes the ‘unhappy object of love’ in a young heiress worth 40,000 pounds is told with all the finesse of a comedy of manners. Even tiny details, like the hungry cur which runs off with her last string of sausages, are recounted with a histrionic ...”

“... French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were ...”

“... of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon Brown’s Fifeshire accent would simply have said to himself, “Labour”; now, he says: “Scottish.” The lopsided devolution settlement has created a sense that the Scots are having their cake and yet guzzling away at it.’ The newspapers accuse a Scottish ...”

“... into her mouth. Jumper cables hooked up to a battery are clipped to both breasts, turning them brown. I had been dropping lit matches from Le Relais onto her belly and Elizabeth, delirious and probably overdosing on the Ecstasy, had been helping before I turned on her and chewed at one of her nipples until I couldn’t ...”

“... not to settle old scores. There will never be a comprehensive or detailed history of Curtis Brown Ltd because the firm, like most discreet literary agencies, doesn’t preserve its records – at least not for the historian. All the more reason that one might hope for some first-hand testimony from Watson. What he provides us is, largely, trivia: such ...”

“... radicalism. The pattern of industrialisation served to publicise the divide, as suggested by Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, published in 1855; while in the early 21st century, Conservative MPs have become a scarcely less endangered species in north-eastern England than they are in Scotland, and are under pressure too in the ...”