“... on Saffron Walden. Saffron was used medicinally and as a flavouring but also for dyeing lace gold, which was much in vogue in the court of James I. Among the figures tramping the roads were the ‘simplers’, sellers of herbs for cooking and strewing. Mary Leech and Judith Vardey, mentioned in the records of the Fleet Market in the 1730s, sold ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... adventures that originally belonged to a separate branch of chivalric literature, the tales of Arthur and his Round Table. In the late 15th century this familiar material was handled with sophisticated wit by Luigi Pulci in Medici Florence and Matteo Maria Boiardo in Este Ferrara. Boiardo left his poem Orlando Innamorato unfinished at his death in ...”

“... of rank and race is more ambiguous than he wants to admit. He quotes the wife (unnamed) of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, installed as Governor of Fiji in 1874, who found the manners of the high-ranking Fijians ‘so perfectly easy and well bred. Nurse can’t understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I don’t like to tell her that ...”

“... biographies since the 1990s, while The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, were reissued in 1997 and supplemented with Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell in 2000. Gaskell’s image, too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable ...”

“... with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, published in 1973, which argued that with superpower status the American executive was exceeding its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together ...”

“... on a coach-trip to Chelsea. He was forced to give up his valuables, which turned out to include a gold pencil, a silver ruler, a magnifying glass and five mathematical instruments. The inventory reads like a cross between the contents of Gulliver’s fob (he hung on to his perspective glass when frisked by the Lilliputians), and the items in Clarissa’s ...”

“... waiting to take us off to the GS&WR for Dublin. Behind the counter, in her black bombazine and gold chains, old Ma Coughlan, the toughest hôtelière between the Liffey and the Atlantic. Her good eye fixed on me like a cat’s on a bird, her glass eye amiably up to heaven, they say it was her late husband did it, I wouldn’t blame him. Her two fists ...”

“... who could not afford a car, but had enough for the speedometer and the rear-view mirror,’ Arthur C. Clarke would remember. They constructed a ‘coelostat’, a device to stabilise the image of a spinning star-field. It was made from four mirrors and the motor of Clarke’s gramophone; it worked, and was proudly displayed in the Science Museum. The ...”

“... vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human ...”

“... like Grand Rapids, Iowa City and Lincoln, Nebraska. She even gave a recital in a small and rackety Gold Rush theatre, now a private residence, just down the street from where I live in San Francisco.) The fortune she acquired by touring was immense. Yet she also seemed to supercharge, rather than deplete, her formidable life-force by means of this ceaseless ...”

“... the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His bruited alchemical skills brought him fame and ...”

“... the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ...”

“... with her family. In her autobiography, she describes a landscape that was ‘swamp red, beastie gold, sky grey, railway red, railway yellow, macrocarpa green, tussock gold, snowgrass gold, penny-orange orange, milk white, snowberry white, all lit by the sky of snow light reflected from ...”

“... an actor. John Wayne is the United States of America.’ O’Hara was urging Congress to strike a gold medal honouring ‘John Wayne, American’. It was 1979, and her co-star in films such as Rio Grande and The Quiet Man was dying of cancer. John Wayne: American takes its title from this Congressional medal. Once you start to look for him, he’s ...”