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“... like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that Margery Kempe, about whose orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the authorities who interrogated her had known that, they ...”

“... to Wyclif’s mind, and to Wyclif’s Oxford, has grown exponentially. As for the long view, Anne Hudson’s magisterial The Premature Reformation (1988) set new standards for the study of Wycliffite texts and their users. Wyclif divides into five parts: his origins and early life in north Yorkshire, of which precious little is known; the University ...”

“... Judith Richardson begins Possessions by quoting a 1933 guidebook to the Hudson Valley: ‘How comes the Hudson to this unique heritage of myth, ghosts, goblins and other lore?’ By the end of her exhaustive chronicle of local history and legend the answer is self-evident: ‘Why is the Hudson Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not be?’ Until I read this book, the Hudson Valley seemed remote from anguished, obviously possessed sites like ravaged towns in Mississippi and throughout the Deep South, the battlefield at Gettysburg, Hollywood or even the foggy menace of Seattle ...”

“... has less orthodox uses, too. In a memoir written with her friend and fellow activist Betty Cook, Anne Scargill recalls attending a debate over the relative merits of nuclear power and coal with her husband, Arthur, president of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1981 to 2002. The scientist who was arguing for nuclear power had brought a rod of uranium in ...”

“... everything. Last autumn, just before the leaves turned, I took the train from Manhattan up the Hudson Valley to visit the Dia gallery in Beacon. The line takes you north along the east bank of the river – ‘vast here, vast and unmoving. A dark country, a country of sturgeon and carp’, as Light Years, written and set in the area, describes it. About ...”

“... fiction remained the drawing-rooms, swimming-pools, churches, clubhouses and beaches of the Hudson Valley he had moved into with his wife and young family in the early Fifties. He insinuated himself into the middle class, he notes in an early journal entry, ‘like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of ...”

“... producing Americana, adding a 20th-century image of the United States to the work of the great Hudson River School painters of the early 19th, or of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer in the late 19th, or of the Ash Can School in turn of the century New York. Like those earlier Americans, they wanted to make the point that their themes were indigenous, not ...”

“... on the fiction itself is no more promising. ‘I was very much disappointed with … Roderick Hudson,’ she wrote to a friend in the summer of 1876. A few months later she exclaims: ‘The idea of throwing the hero down a cliff just to get rid of him.’ An early letter reports that she always had ‘a stronger taste’ for ‘critical writings than for ...”

“... about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms ...”

“... artist? Did he look at masterpieces of English landscape painting? Of American paintings of the Hudson River Valley? Of German Romantic landscape painting? Maybe at some of each, somewhere during those six years. Solnit points out that his bookshop had contained illustrated works, many doubtless with conventional landscapes. They lurk, too, in his ...”

“... delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ A tiny poem, ‘The Thin Man’, in Justice’s second collection, Night Light ...”

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... aesthetic and intellectual appreciation to what they acquired. Country Life’s proprietor, Edward Hudson, himself pioneered one approach to the reinvention of the country house when he commissioned Lutyens, who had designed the magazine’s offices and furnishings, to remodel Lindisfarne Castle, a ruined Tudor fortress on Holy Island. The work was finished in ...”

“... at the confluence. Less than ten years after the song’s first publication, the English writer Anne Plumptre visited the Meeting of the Waters, and wrote that to its name ‘the delightful muse of the Anacreon of Ireland, Mr Moore, has given a celebrity which can never be lost again’. As early as 1823 a tribute poem addressed by a ‘young lady’ to her ...”

“... were presented with a particularly juicy scandal, as in 1809, when it was discovered that Mary Anne Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, had been using her position to broker the sale of commissions.Historians​  of later periods will benefit from applying Knights’s big themes to subsequent stages of the corruption ...”