“... his Whig interlocutors would ever be capable of unseating the detested Tory government of Lord North. In a letter to his friend Edmund Burke he complained that his aristocratic fellow guests were ‘as unfit to storm a citadel as they would be proper for the defence of it’. Burke’s response, dated 8 October 1777, has been much anthologised. It is a ...”

“... the status for cemeteries that service African townships such as Alexandra and Soweto, to the north and south of the city. Cemeteries can, however, move up – and presumably down – the league table. Alexandra, which once had the unfortunate distinction of occupying the only ‘E’ slot ever allocated by the municipality, was recently upgraded to ...”

“... the cloak-and-pipe fellow who was dropped for the Earl of Essex. His other colonial fiasco (the North Carolina settlement which vanished without trace in 1586) is only slightly more remembered. Britain was never seriously to colonise South America, and there never was an El Dorado in the form Ralegh sought. But his reckless, unpopular, foreigner’s sort of ...”

“... Nobody knows​ … nobody knows.’ Elizabeth Bishop said her grandmother’s remark was the chorus of her childhood. ‘I often wondered what my grandmother knew that none of the rest of us knew and if she alone knew it, or if it was a total mystery that really nobody knew except perhaps God.’ She ventured to ask: ‘What do you know, Gammie, that we don’t know? Why don’t you tell us? Tell me!’ Gammie wouldn’t say whether she was keeping a secret or confessing bewilderment; she just laughed and replied: ‘Go on with you! Scat!’ This image of a person obscurely in the know, at once self-collected and reticent, is also an image of the person Bishop became – or the one many took her to be ...”

“... and helpless to fix the damage. He was married three times: to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1949 to 1972 and to Caroline Blackwood from 1972 to his death in 1977. With Hardwick he had a daughter, Harriet, and with Blackwood a son, Sheridan; he was also stepfather to Blackwood’s three daughters. Towards the end of his marriage ...”

“... Though England still had an heir to the throne in the ten-year-old Prince Henry, the queen, Elizabeth of York, now dangerously old at 36, immediately sought to make assurance doubly sure by conceiving again: the pregnancy was to kill her. Isabel and Ferdinand, however, wanted to maintain the alliance that the marriage of Catherine and Arthur had ...”

“... and www.journalproject.com scatter empty notebooks willy-nilly around the phone-booths of North America, in the hope and expectation that some phone-booth-using Ginsberg or Emily Dickinson will scrawl beautiful poems inside, and then pass the journal on – and the amazing thing is, they do. People go to make a telephone call, to cancel an appointment ...”

“... the first book, is a ‘country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America’, now called Panem. The allusion is to Juvenal’s ‘bread and circuses’, but as pronounced in the movies it sounds like the name of a defunct airline. The novels by Suzanne Collins, who also had a hand in writing the movies, were published in ...”

“... thing to be brought up in the Patriot din of Liberty and property and to be allow’d neither?’ Elizabeth Robinson inquired as a young woman. As Mrs Montagu, she would eventually acquire a considerable measure of both – but only after the death of the man by whose name she has since been known to posterity. None of the women Syliva Myers includes in the ...”

“... touring the Birmingham factories. Nice Work has epigraphs from Sybil, Hard Times, Felix Holt and North and South, and we are warned (in the words of Charlotte Brönte’s prelude to Shirley) to expect something as ‘unromantic as Monday morning’. It isn’t quite as dour as all that, but nor is it as blithe as Lodge’s earlier Rummidge novels, Changing ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell​ of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did ...”

“... by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath’. She would have liked her three subsequent novels and book ...”

“... An Indian career meant that sons hardly saw their fathers once they were no longer infants. As Elizabeth Buettner observes in Empire Families, Sir Adelbert Talbot, the Resident in Kashmir, retired in the same month that his son Addy came out to start his own career in the ICS. Henry Cotton’s grandfather served in Madras from 1801 to 1830, retiring the ...”

“... Parker was raped and stabbed but survived. Taken captive along with Rachel and her son James were Elizabeth Kellog and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader ...”

“... today the site of St Paul’s Cathedral) was rebuilt, and decorated with life-size statues of Elizabeth I and Lud. Here was a London anchored to a past that was demonstrably not Roman. (At the risk of causing disappointment, it ought to be added that the most likely origin of ‘Ludgate’ is the Old English hlid-geat: ‘postern’ or ...”