“... media. At this period, one of the 17th century’s better cookery books – apparently the work of Oliver Cromwell’s widow – was published only to be lampooned, and another Civil War widow, Lucy Hutchinson, was constrained to complain of the ‘court caterpillars’ who could present her husband as a life-denier in spite of his affection for music and ...”

“... One especially hot, slow afternoon in September a young man with a brisk manner, piercing blue-green eyes and a heavy accent came in, asked for tickets, showed me his identity card quickly (I had no chance to see his name, only to register that he was a graduate student), and then, as he was leaving, turned and asked me what I had said my name was. When I ...”

“... whose new project is a study of the criminal mind – Dickens, meanwhile, would have been writing Oliver Twist. While Oates has a very nasty time, largely self-inflicted, Maggs is rescued by a serving girl who brings him to his senses: Maggs should give up on the worthless Phipps and go straight back to his real children in Australia; and he does, taking her ...”

“... left Lennox whispered: ‘I did one, she did the other.’) ‘Sir William Orpen’s portrait of Oliver St John Gogarty dressed in his hunting pink. Pure Bronzino. Lennox! Shall we ever forget Firenze in 1913? And the Louuuuvur!’ (At his elbow the serpent’s ‘Pure fake.’) ‘A masterly portrait of poor Paddy Tuohy by Leo Whelan. What a sad end! An ...”

“... and repressed appetites. And I have no doubt that when I was marched off with Maureen to see Oliver! on the stage, I recognised a little of my absent mother in the character of Nancy. Margaret had suddenly grown up – and she’d become robust. Nancy faded from my imagination, but Maureen never quite gave her up: the strong girl with the heart of gold ...”

“... of Mansfield itself. But Jane Austen, who understood so well Mrs Norris and her appetite for green baize, is surely quite happy to present the Crawfords as persons with whom her acquaintance can only be rather distant. She doesn’t know them well, and she doesn’t mind. ‘Let other pens than mine dwell on guilt and misery ... Edmund did cease to care ...”

“... have not attended to the ‘current tendency’, Ludmilla Jordanova stamps her foot in the Bethnal Green Museum: ‘Social differences in clothing are not mentioned, nor are prices given. In fact, a number of the cases clearly contain expensive, hand-made or exclusive clothes. To imply that all children at a given time – the cases are structured by period ...”

“... among them was the bird of Yeats in its great cage, wound up to sing by a massive key; a darkish green tree, as I remember, occupied most of the cage, and a quite small shimmering bird, whose beak would open and shut while the musical box in the basement was playing, perched carelessly upon a branch at one side. The whole affair glittered, but I cannot claim ...”

“... selective. Gone was the eclecticism of turn-of-the-century scholars like George Saintsbury and Oliver Elton, and of surveys like the Cambridge History of English Literature. In The Great Tradition (1947), Leavis reduced the essential canon to only four writers, dismissing once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as too like his own ...”

“... cupboard houses stuff that never gets used, often in sets: the set of trifle glasses with the green stems, the set of cake knives won at a Whist Drive, besides all the items no well-run household should be without (grapefruit knives, a cheese slice) but which are never actually required. It is a museum, this cupboard, to a theory of domestic economy. But ...”

“... Philip II or Philip III. ‘For virtually every point, a counterpoint can be found,’ Peter Green lamented in 1981, and there the matter still stands today. The tone of the debate meanwhile has become more strident, as those with long-held positions find it increasingly important to defend them – especially the Greek archaeologists at Vergina, who ...”

“... first indication that the Telegraph is preparing to turn its attention to the Tories. First up, Oliver Letwin, who apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place ...”

“... polecat in the comic strip Pogo; Andy Warhol produced a silk-screened Nixon with skin as biliously green as the Wicked Witch of the West and, in a riotous series of drawings, Philip Guston transformed the president’s ski nose and heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his ...”

“... You know, I’m to the point now I can just feel each one with him. [sigh] The next one is GREEN: grass, hat, ink, apple . . . The sighs continued and there were long pauses before each following shock was given, but this subject was fully obedient and went on to flip all the switches. In the initial experiment there were 40 subjects. Many of those ...”

“... Army lore, then a whole two hours of Scottish singing. Then tea. Then bed. Then a sermon on Oliver Cromwell and his approach to God. Then tea. Then bed.Sharp was the main inspiration for the title character of Sweet William, a multi-tasker in the sex department. I thought this novel her ‘sunniest’ when it was published in 1975. Yet it ends in loss ...”