“... amid the Broads. Still, none of Henry’s devices proved enough to stop a great rebellion in the North, the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth’, the kernel of which was popular fury at monastic dissolutions. The pilgrims requisitioned Durham Cathedral’s ancient banner of St Cuthbert to perform its usual job of ensuring victory on ...”

“... later work, to the older authorial convention of a time-free consciousness. As a pre-war writer Elizabeth Bowen made gestures towards the Modern but preferred her own pattern of individualities. She was not much of a theorist, though she liked to advance her ideas on fiction boldly and with a certain panache, in what she would have described as a ...”

“... than ours: perdere la bussola, the loss not merely of bearings but of the compass itself. Queen Elizabeth II will still be around for the vote, I know, but as little more than an accusing spectre. Within less than half of her own reign the glamour of Monarchy has vanished. All that the Crown now accomplishes is to counterpoint and somehow exaggerate an ...”

“... She understands remarkably well the ‘state of the nation’ idiom that came naturally to Elizabeth Gaskell, as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... husband) takes a week off work. A colleague suggests he go on holiday to Kushiro, in the north, and offers to pay if Komura will deliver a package for him, to his sister. Komura is met at the airport by the sister and a friend, Shimao. Komura and Shimao end up in bed together, but ‘after several failed attempts to have sex with Shimao, Komura gave ...”

“... children are tossing a ball back and forth: ‘It fell among the flowerbeds./Or fled to the north gate.//A daylight moon hung up/In the Western sky, bald white.’ The trajectory of the lost toy is symbolic of the march of history, moving ‘eastward among the stars/Toward February and October’. The revolution and the children’s executions ...”

“... to negotiate a course through the vast, multitudinous, close-set and ice-locked archipelago to the north of the American continent. The ice is now melting: within 25 years the Arctic Ocean will probably be entirely free of ice during the summer; some climate researchers believe it could happen as soon as 2013. (Mapping the effects of climate change is one of ...”

“... texts by the same writer, which is not necessarily the most illuminating move. Mrs Gaskell’s North and South might be better read in the context of Victorian sanitation reports than in the context of Cranford. Yet the fact that Gaskell wrote Cranford as well throws light on why the industrial conflicts of North and ...”

“... where he ran amok, insulting generals and riding the equestrian statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put ...”

“... happen often: the family was relatively prosperous petit bourgeois and, besides, the coast of North-East Scotland, where they lived, had never become as totally dependent on the potato for nourishment as other communities in Europe, most notably Ireland. Even so, it happened. The trouble with the easily grown and plentifully cropping potato is that it is ...”

“... Bondwoman’s Narrative’, was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf’. Although ...”

“... But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and the nephew of Lord Burghley, her chief counsellor, he had been born to the purple. But he was the youngest of five sons, and was still unprovided for financially when his father died suddenly in 1579, leaving the ...”

“... had to go on. Five months later in the Abbey, Channon described the splendour of the occasion, the north transept ‘a vitrine of bosoms and jewels and bobbing tiaras’, while at the centre, the fragile, stuttering king was all but swamped by the occasion. Edward and Wallis were at the Château de Candé near Tours, listening on the radio. He was now the Duke ...”

“... level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then entered Parliament and almost at once was appointed ...”