“... was nothing to worry about – rest, some pills, and everything would be fine. The hospital was in Surrey, on a hill. It had been founded as a private institution for the well-off, and became part of the National Health Service after the war. The man who endowed it in the 19th century had made a fortune out of patent medicines – liver pills and pills for ...”

“... of expression’. Now English poetry, dormant since Chaucer and Lydgate, got to its feet and sang. John Leland, a friend of Wyatt’s youth, later wrote: ‘The English tongue was rude, its verses vile/Now, skilful Wyatt, it has known your file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do ...”

“... the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably the Insolvency Agency, which was then part of the ...”

“... and finding one’s balance, and then wondering if one has really grasped the thing after all. John Donne’s poems in particular are extremely unstable. Critics have often got into a sweat about the way that they argue implausible cases, and very often, too, things happen in the course of them which make it quite clear that while the speaker is busily ...”

“... present. ‘Unbelievably,’ he says of the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell’s killing of John D’Esterre (in a duel that set Catholic against Protestant), ‘O’Connell faced no legal proceedings at all over this act, while his standing among his followers was enhanced.’Rather than spoiling his book, this authorial stance galvanises readers to ...”

“... England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J.A. Williamson’s The Tudor Age (1953) – with the logo of the double rose of the dynasty which, conveniently, coincided with a generous 16th century of 118 years, 1485 to 1603. It is a good question how we would have ...”

“... III’s summer visits were turning Weymouth into a fashionable resort, and he was schooled in Surrey until the money ran out when he was 12. A dedicated autodidact for the rest of his life (Peacock’s death in 1866 was reportedly hastened, if only by shock, when he refused to abandon his library during a house fire), he made sporadic attempts at the ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... Five such charitable institutions were created around mid-century: Earlswood near Redhill in Surrey, and the Eastern, Western, Northern and Midland Counties Asylums. The herding together of huge populations of problem people in turn prompted the framing of new medical categories, in particular the mongoloid type or Down’s syndrome, first identified at ...”

“... to regard her as a stooge for the English, given her detestation of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, who had been an unwelcome escort to her new husband in 1503, and who went on to command the English army which in September 1513 shattered the Scottish elite and killed King James IV at Flodden. Later she continued to be eclectic in her distribution of ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”

“... in the subject itself. A poet’s earliest efforts are usually marred by self-consciousness and John Berryman’s are no exception to the rule. For most poets, however, finding a distinct and convincing voice is, at least in part, a process of shedding unwanted affectations and exaggerated self-importance. For Berryman the process was reversed. He learnt to ...”

“... fiats and a ruling-class weapon, but as integral to the contested politics of community life. John Beattie is among the finest exponents of this more historically sensitive approach to crime and punishment. His somewhat misleadingly titled Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (1986) – a pioneering study of trends in crime and prosecution in ...”

“... Rose and the Swan were in Southwark. These areas lay respectively in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, beyond the writ of London’s mayor and aldermen, who generally viewed theatres as a threat to public order, health and decency. Two factors perhaps gave Burbage and his colleagues some cause for optimism. The first was that the Blackfriars, like other ...”

“... born towards the end of the century’. And while he’s very good on the Hampshire history – John Tyndall, Tennyson, Allen’s radical fiction – it doesn’t tell us much about Thompson. The fact that Austen’s Chawton was ‘just twenty miles away’ hardly seems impressive – it’s unlikely Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly ...”