“... by bedding heiresses. No slavemaster had a higher scorn for aristocrats than the promiscuous Sir William Beckford, the exceedingly rich Lord Mayor of London who complained to Horace Walpole that the air of Richmond was so bad that 12 of his natural children had died there; to which one can only add that they would have died faster in the West Indies. East of ...”

“... nominally under Sir Gilbert, but more delicate and more respectful of post-medieval fabric. William Morris’s firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings ...”

“... become human. Mothers’ and babies’ calculations of love reflect the law proposed by the late William Hamilton, a creative genius of sociobiology. (Hamilton died this year of malaria contracted in the Congo, where he was pursuing his latest ideas on the transmission of disease between species – arguably a martyr to his own passion for truth.) Hamilton ...”

“... Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent biographies, this ...”

“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”

“... history,’ Stewart muses. He wanders into Amara’s World War One cemetery, where a grid of white crosses and an Indo-Muslim dome sit alongside a rice paddy. His distant predecessor St John Philby (father of Kim), who acted as political officer in Amara ninety years ago, still enjoys a local reputation. Another sheikh fondly remembers one ‘Mr ...”

“... creole families of colonial Venezuela, the familias mantuanas as they were known (from the long white mantua or gown worn by the women), he was one of the privileged few who could afford to travel in Europe as a young man. In Paris in 1804, he was dazzled by the spectacle of Napoleon’s coronation and yearned for similar personal glory. An eccentric ...”

“... In​ 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war ...”

“... with garden peas (Pisum sativum): round or wrinkled seeds; yellow or green seed colour; purple or white flowers. Taking great care to keep his self-fertilising stock as pure as possible, so he could be confident that, for example, the green-seeded peas reliably produced only green seeds and yellow-seeded ones only yellow, he proceeded to hybridise them and ...”

“... writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her ...”

“... officers ‘both a sneezing’ (a snuff box). In the waistcoat there’s ‘a prodigious bundle of white thin substances … marked with black figures; which we humbly conceive to be writings’, along with ‘a sort of engine, from the back of which were extended twenty long poles … wherewith we conjecture the Man-Mountain combs his head’.Grant ...”

“... but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable ...”

“... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...”

“... a fugitive from America since being prosecuted under the Mann Act for his liaison with a teenage white girl. Cravan said of him: ‘After Poe, Whitman and Emerson he is the greatest glory of America.’ There was a background of artistic interest in boxing at this time, but although Braque and Picasso made drawings of black boxers they never went as far as ...”

“... self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame Merle, he is the great round world in person. And that remarkable fragment Sanditon perhaps takes this ...”