“... is still in the library, and so are works by her cousin Elizabeth’s husband, James ‘Hermes’ Harris, of Salisbury, a proponent of education for women who, fifteen years after the countess’s death in 1758, kept alive the legacy of the Ladies Club when his daughters and their friends staged the first recorded all-female production of a Shakespeare ...”

“... Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at ...”

“... Murdoch, most of it at some deep level boring because it is so much on one side or the other. William Shawcross surprised and disappointed many of his admirers by coming out as a big Murdoch fan in his 1992 biography. Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which ...”

“... about women yet understood them so little’. The third level of perception spans the millennia. William Jenner, Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, and a distinguished historian and translator, is a master of the full sweep of the Chinese past as well as the Chinese present. The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis ...”

“... on Arran, hull 802 working the so-called ‘Uig triangle’, from Uig on Skye to the islands of Harris and North Uist. The ferries were part of the Scottish government’s plan to reduce the average age of the ten largest vessels in the CalMac fleet (which has thirty ships in total) from 21 years in 2017 to 12 years by 2025, and thus to improve ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and Joseph Pearce. More critical studies by Ian Ker and William Oddie have emphasised the links between a life spent joyfully giving no thought to the morrow and the apologetic books, which argue that only Christian belief can supply a maximum of wonder at this world’s existence and a maximum refusal to take it to ...”

“... pizza on a Friday night. He praised industrial vegetable oils yet had never tasted Nutella.In 1914 William Lever decided to diversify his palm oil empire. Margarine, he thought, had the potential to be a much bigger market than soap, because consumers would always be willing to spend more on feeding themselves than on washing. In the 1880s, Lever and his ...”

“... To this day, the Iraqis have not forgotten Churchill’s insistence on ordering not-yet-Bomber Harris to machine-gun defenceless women and children from the air in 1921, an episode Churchill then hushed up for fear of public outrage. Nor have the Iranians forgotten the coup fomented by the CIA and MI6 – and approved at a distance by Churchill – which ...”

“... America and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy ...”

“... the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the ...”

“... about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: William Shakespeare (1564-1616, ‘playwright and poet’) is allotted more than 30,000 words, a length achieved only by devoting a large proportion of them to various aspects of his literary after-life – about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The ...”

“... maintenance or alterations. ‘Every time we want to change a light bulb, it costs £25,’ Colin Harris, the deputy head, told me. Ellington and Hereson has been trying to break away from Kent’s traditional selective education system – the county retains the 11-plus – by becoming an academy, which would result in its being funded directly from central ...”

“... the TV viewing public tuning in and huge street parties. Umberto Eco, in the calcio equivalent of William Cobbett’s ‘I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach,’ had asked in 1978: ‘Is it possible to have a revolution on a football Sunday?’ Sandro Pertini, who had fought in the First World War and as a partisan in the Second, became ...”

“... my fingers were straying. Here were the memoirs of a few dandies of the turn of the century, Frank Harris and Boni de Castellane, and a copy of the commonplace book of the mysterious Comtesse Diane, but it was the books on the left-hand side of the shelf to which destiny was leading me. Slowly I crossed my right hand over my left hand, and, after the first ...”