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“... still presumably expected to be greeted by a peal on the abbey bells and qualified for a passing bell if things went ill. Horace Walpole said: ‘The English are like ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters.’ That was in 1790. The English were about to undergo a collective change in behaviour: the waters to which they would increasingly waddle were ...”

“... men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to list). Their families often stayed on, the lofty ...”

“... of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich head-dress. A noble tomb. His son John was also many times ...”

“... what more brilliant if small-scale artists had done in this Latin inscription of 1592 on the fifth bell in the Chapel Tower of Winchester College:  CAELESTESAUDITE SONOS  MORTALESThis says: ‘Bell-notes are prayers from earth to heaven as well as blessings descending to earth from the skies.’ The finest inscriptions ...”

“... on the staircase by the chapel watching the departure of the royal party. I sit by the statue of Henry VI (a pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King. Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here is Coutts Bank and some ...”

“... signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who ...”

“... figured me to be a potential candidate for the priesthood; she got me my first gig ringing the bell on the altar at St Winnin’s, though a combination of sleepiness and professional jealousy on my part was to harm my chances of advancement in the eyes of Father McLaughlin. Mrs Wallace’s funeral was my first one, and in some senses no funeral could ever ...”

“... possibilities have become such an accepted fact – not least in the social sciences, from Daniel Bell to Fredric Jameson – that it is easy to forget what a large-scale re-engineering of human lives they have led to. Jennifer Egan, an American writer, is rare for still being able to register incredulity at the weirdness of this process. In her novel Look at ...”

“... to limit the action to Saturday, 15 February 2003, and the early hours of the following morning. Henry Perowne is a 48-year-old consultant neurosurgeon with a large house on a square near the Post Office Tower in Fitzrovia. He’s happily married to Rosalind, a newspaper lawyer. They have two children: Theo, an 18-year-old blues guitarist, who lives with ...”

“... its provenance from the Established Church to cover the governing classes in general. What Henry Fairlie did two years later in a famous article in the Spectator was to gloss the term as identifying a particular sort of informal power network, which included not only the Prime Minister, of course, but also ‘such lesser mortals as the Chairman of the ...”

“... of the opening sentences of the previous chapter, verbatim. ‘And on it went. When the bell went for morning break I found I’d filled three sides.’ Black Swan Green is in part the story of a stammering poet finding his true voice as a writer of fluent prose. The idea that a novel like this would stream out of a 13-year-old’s pen isn’t ...”

“... scheme for the Carolinas provided evidence of speculative folly much nearer to home. Frederic Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister in Bangor, Maine, talked in 1838 about ‘bubble constitutions, which burst as soon as blown’, singling out for ridicule Locke’s plan for distinct orders of nobility. The glory of America was that it had not adopted a ...”

“... over thirty of the former and some of them almost fatal. The cost was great. In For whom the bell tolls, which he wrote when he was about forty, he represents the 52-year-old El Sordo as an old man wondering why the prospect of death is unattractive even at his great age. At the time Hemingway still had his most remarkable antics to come, during the ...”

“... Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy ...”

“... in 1788, soon after it was finished, and there is also a small, fine-enamel-on-copper copy by Henry Bone, made ten years later. From these we can see more clearly not only what Reynolds saw, but how Hunter saw himself. He is dressed in the rumpled velvet suit of the intellectual in the privacy of his study. On his table the ink is uncorked; his right hand ...”