“... Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published. From the mid-Eighties mountainous illness surrounded Edward, from which he nonetheless retrieved the last big works: Customs in Common (1991), which traced a disappearing culture back over ground ...”

“... as well as on the Languet-Sidney correspondence and other letters secured by the private scholar James Osborn and published in his Young Philip Sidney (1972). Sidney’s life was a warp of virtue woven onto the woof of fortune. It was one of history’s ironies that Philip II of Spain was his godfather, and gave him his name. His fortune was to be a ...”

“... outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of the landmark Education Act. Forster’s personal style was flat, but Matthew was also jealous of his political success. Still, he did not give his sister away – in the Lake Country ‘with the great fells standing sentinel’, as family ...”

“... in turn, are helped by Ella Grogan, the daughter of a local midwife and a gardener’s boy, William. All the characters in this hierarchy gain some narrative attention, but mainly it plays over the old man and the Paxtons’ daughter Alice. Between them, these two mark off a momentous span of English historical time. Alice is born on the eve of Eden’s ...”

“... William Blake is surely the locus classicus for human sympathy with other-than-human animals. Anyone who is, as I am, seared by the cruelty and injustice humans inflict on their fellow animals will recognise in Blake his own perceptions expressed with unsurpassed accuracy and poignancy. Blake died a decade before Victoria came to the throne ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... and Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and metalwork. It was a reinvention of the country house as social force, ‘a quiet attempt to change the ...”

“... Inn, Rugeley on the exhumed body of Walter Palmer five months after his murder by his brother William, the multiple poisoner. On the removal of the outer coffin a hole was bored in the leaden receptacle in which Walter Palmer’s body was confined, and instantly a most sickening and noxious effluvium escaped, which permeated the entire building, affected ...”

“... Christian apologist, and I was, I confess, the man who had not read The Man Who Was Thursday. P.D. James, in her introduction to a selection of Father Brown stories, says: ‘Chesterton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence.’ Almost everyone reaches for the word ‘genial’ when they talk about him, and we are told that he loved to argue. All of these ...”

“... estate, and her final defiant infatuation at the age of 80 with the strapping second-rate actor William Augustus Conway. Hester’s mother had taught her only child ‘to play a thousand pretty Tricks, & tell a Thousand Pretty Stories and repeat a Thousand pretty verses to divert’ her violent, irascible and elegant father. ‘Rakish men seldom make tender ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... that one might expect to find is barely in evidence. Faraday, unlike such Oxbridge scientists as William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick or William Whewell, refrained from burdening science with proofs of design. As one who believed that knowledge of God was to be obtained through the plain teaching of Scripture, he regarded ...”

“... that anti-semitism has been, among other things, Christian. ‘I could never understand how William Empson, a poet and critic I revere, could hate Christians and especially Catholics, thinking their religion nothing but a sordid cult of blood and sacrifice. Christ’s blood was the form of his own suffering, he didn’t recommend bloodletting for other ...”

“... she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where she contacted a Cromwellian exile called William Scot, offering him a pardon in exchange for information on alleged Dutch plans to invade England with the help of other banished republicans. (Hence her routine description in literature textbooks as ‘playwright and spy’.) After this paradoxically ...”