“... on its tracks. Twenty-five years ago, addressing a Past and Present conference not long before Peter Laslett published The world we have lost, Keith Thomas declared: ‘The study of the family in English history has simply not begun.’ Today it is an activity for tens of thousands of people. In the primary schools it competes with Norman castles and Saxon ...”

“... desired to live.’ If we are willing to follow this cue, we instantly discover a more coherent reading: Cleopatra indeed makes a great show of rendering Caesar a complete account of her possessions and Seleucus indeed makes humiliating nonsense of her grand profession; Cleopatra’s words are exploded but Cleopatra herself is far from being ...”

“... sees his mother and father and brother again. The Germans shoot Mr and Mrs Steenwijk and their son Peter and burn down their house, because Fake Ploeg, chief inspector of the Haarlem police, has been found dead outside their front door. The Germans also shoot 29 Communists. It is the Communists who have assassinated Ploeg, and the body originally lay outside ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great ...”

“... of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had ...”

“... was to be estranged from her ominous father. There she once sat in some sort of castle, or not, reading, for sure, the literature of Romanticism, and growing up to resemble – in the opinion of the writer’s aunt, the historian C.B.A. Behrens – a character out of Lermontov. Lermontov, for his part, was a character out of Byron, and so was Pechorin, the ...”

“... trickery.Yet (in England, at least) – ubi sunt? For the last three months I’ve been reading books of poems submitted for review to the London Review. With the exception of a few amused parodies and the odd Waddington-style coelocanth, none show any trace of being haunted by the bogies of ’72. Studying the work of writers aged between 30 and ...”

“... of the Mill’. He at once, without any hesitation, announced that he agreed with your reading of it. He was not content with announcing his own opinion, but evidently set to work to find internal evidence to support it. Yesterday he came again and read us a passage from Graham Balfour’s life of RLS … I think you have the life so I didn’t ...”

“... grew up in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Long Island, Chicago and Philadelphia. Her father, Peter, was a director of the United Jewish Appeal and her mother, Estelle, worked as an art consultant while running a home that Colwin described as ‘even more bourgeois’ than her own (and ‘I’m the most bourgeois person in the world’). The difference ...”

“... Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden and, somewhere in the background, the progress of the church year. Parts of the poem are movingly autobiographical, full of elegiac ...”

“... writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First (the circumstances undescribed in the diary) I would never have picked myself up to do much except possibly teach – and teach badly. It was the fairly spurious self-confidence I got from this fluke ...”

“... Netta unconsciously lusts after Hitler and occasionally goes to bed with her Fascist friend Peter, a nastily moustached man who’s served time in prison for fatally running over a pedestrian while drunk. Unknown to her, Bone has a split personality – a darkly humorous plot device that comes across as an exaggeration of a blackout-prone drinker’s ...”

“... once, and long after most of our bedtimes. But it was much admired, I’m told, by the Scotsman-reading classes.My school was one of the many to bulk-buy a set of the Longman schools edition and, having bought it, was going to haul it out of the books cupboard year on year, through the failure of the March 1979 devolution referendum and the accession of Mrs ...”

“... routines didn’t need to be solemn: on one occasion she and Roy sifted poetry submissions by reading them aloud in a Barnsley accent. Anything that didn’t produce hysterical laughter went forward for further consideration. When Roy’s father died she volunteered to help with the catering after the funeral, but made herself scarce when family arrived ...”

“... in the Ministry of Education and ever the brilliant talent scout, he secured the appointment of Peter Behrens as director of the Düsseldorf Academy. The same year he was instrumental in establishing the Deutsche Werkbund in Munich. The Werkbund was committed to design reform, as William Morris had been, but to reform that worked with industry not against ...”