“... that she must be its real author, and that if she wasn’t then she’d finally met her match. Robert Elsmere (1888) set Mrs Humphry Ward on Eliot’s vacant throne, and ten years later The Sorrows of Satan (1895) established Marie Corelli as heir apparent. Trollope would have been provoked by Woolf’s celebrated requirement for women writers. A room of ...”

“... comprises delusional boasts that cast them as philosophers and their trade as at best a social service, at worst a particularly dodgy branch of alternative medicine or new age bunk: sustainabulous, green, responsible, liminal, wellness, community, performative, holistic, participatory, community (again). Mind mange? Ghosts in the infrastructure? Boney’s ...”

“... Living Mountain, in an edition called The Grampian Quartet. But it took the apostolic arrival of Robert Macfarlane, who proclaimed her works in The Old Ways and in an introduction to the 2011 edition of The Living Mountain, to turn Shepherd into a publishing sensation. It’s a chippy Aberdonian thing to say, but I notice that this validation had to come ...”

“... several thousand women and men to Europe from the Caribbean, most of them destined for domestic service. Between 1492 and 1900, somewhere between 2.4 and 4.9 million Indigenous Americans were enslaved, perhaps a quarter of the total number of people enslaved in the period.By aiming at a ‘deliberate inversion of the imperial perspective’, On Savage ...”

“... Davidian, and rushed back to tell everyone. When Jones got to the compound, Koresh was talking to Robert Rodriguez, an ATF agent who had gone undercover as a Davidian. Rodriguez left the building and informed his superiors, but they decided to go ahead with the raid anyway. By the time the ATF team arrived at the compound at around 9.40 a.m., the Davidians ...”

“... in a growing body of writing as a sanctuary. ‘Healthy’ homes made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of ...”

“... the bishops of Exeter, filling it with paintings and tapestries. There were some brutal evictions. Robert Cecil used ‘strong-arm tactics’ to acquire land from the bishop of Durham and hastily evicted the sitting tenant, Walter Raleigh. Arundel House, the most gorgeous palace of them all, was acquired by Alethea Howard and her husband, the earl of ...”

“... Both phrases are perfectly clear, yet each is as far as possible from what the insufferable Robert Nye commends in the diction of Grigson: ‘how close that idiom comes to living speech’. Much virtue in that ‘living’! For Gurney, the life that there is in English speech has been injected into it by lonely, learned and masterfully artificial ...”

“... the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em bits.This is unfortunate: Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ is a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love ...”

“... of Maximilian Aue, who served as an SS officer in the elite Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence service. Aue witnessed and took part in the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’, from the firing-squad slaughters beginning in 1941 through to the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Brought up partly in Provence and so ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”

“... from the Sacraments, the Puritans undermined the clergy’s position as a parish conciliation service. It is true they wanted parochial unity – but unity on their terms. Theirs was a different conception of the minister’s role from that envisaged for George Herbert’s Country Parson, ‘reconciling neighbours that are at variance’, and charitably ...”

“... From 1991 to 1996, our dealings were managed through Operation Rockingham, a Defence Intelligence Service organisation that served as a clearing-house for all the intelligence support provided to Unscom by the UK. By 1996 most of Unscom’s leads had dried up and my need for actionable information was such that the Secret Intelligence ...”

“... military folklore, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-and-Tight, what you learn at all the service academies: ‘that being a real warrior and hating Jane Fonda are synonymous.’* When Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built on the Washington Mall, well-organised veterans who criticised it as the ‘gook monument’ – Lin is ...”

“... Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air ...”