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“... of this and that. It buys from Oxfam books like The Brontë Country, Dickens’s London, With Hardy in Dorset, Literary Bypaths of Old England, The Land of Scott. Academic libraries don’t cater for it, and academic critics have about as much regard for it as they have for Disney World or back numbers of Reader’s Digest. It’s been out of favour since ...”

“... a tram-conductor, Mohammed el Adl: an experience Forster elaborately reported to his confidante, Florence Barger. The letters are informative, up to a point soon reached, on Forster’s personal and professional relations. They are interesting when they involve Oscar Browning – who brought Forster to see six chickens he tended ...”

“... a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness. Newbolt’s is ...”

“... method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor of his letters – was foiled by the impenetrability of the pyramid that the sage of Max Gate erected over his remains. By ghost-writing his own life through his secretary wife and burning all the revealingly private materials ...”

“... silkily aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry peasants, would not do. In the Nation, James complained that the novel had a ‘fatal lack of magic’, and was written in a ‘verbose and redundant style … Everything human in the book strikes us as factious and ...”

“... it freedom. Barbara Gates’s fine study of Victorian suicide, taken as the harbinger of what Hardy called ‘the coming universal wish not to live’, ironically opens with the self-slaughter of one of the Revolution’s most implacable foes, Lord Castlereagh. And irony holds the key to 19th-century attitudes towards self-destruction. From pulpits down ...”

“... souls of millions of women everywhere – readers of Jane Austen and the Brontës as well as of Hardy and George Eliot, viewers of classic American Westerns along with readers of Little Women. Her own 19th-century sense of things seems to have had no trace of modern cynicism or distancing irony to dull its edge, or any corrupting doubt to cloud her ...”

“... The Devils. Not to be missed. Divas of the Divan, based on an exchange of letters between Florence Nightingale’s doctor and the explorer Isabella Bird’s doctors, throws light on how clever women suffering from the miseries and frustrations of middle-class Victorian life used invalidism, often consciously, but even more ...”

“... took him some years before he returned home to put the lessons he had learned to remarkable use. Florence had proved wanting in classical history but it provided a fertile ground for the exploration of the new. The Renaissance was a rebirth which took place literally on the ruins of classical civilisation. Many paintings of the Nativity were set against ...”

“... found a teenage girl who used to swim out to the island and back again. To this day, there are hardy members of swimming clubs who do the same. In December 1937, Ted Cole and Ralph Roe escaped from the Model Industries building and took to the water. No one has ever claimed to have seen them again. The guards spread a story that the men had been ...”

“... woods were cut for timber and charcoal, pannage was restricted, sheep came to the fore, and the hardy, semi-wild pig of the open forest seems to have lost ground to an animal fattened on cereals and legumes or housed one per cottage and fed on kitchen scraps, as in some Italian villages today. That animal was to become known as the Old English pig, where ...”

“... the annual trade fair drew visitors from all over the world and brought new looks from Paris and Florence and Turkey and India, there were strict regulations about ribbons and lace and silk, and who could wear an artificial braid in their hair or gold jewellery or ‘expensive belts with silver decorations’. In 1530, the Imperial Police Ordinance ...”

“... has also made use of an unpublished biographical notebook kept by Sir Sydney Cockerell, friend of Hardy and W.S. Blunt, who inspired Freya to write her first and finest volume of autobiography, Traveller’s Prelude (1950). She tries to avoid hagiography, however, and has usefully delved into the little-known memoirs of the late Gertrude Caton Thompson, the ...”

“... peasant villages during the 1860s and 1870s. In English, his only obvious counterparts are Hardy and Lawrence, except that Verga is not interested in intellectuals or outsiders; his priests, for instance, are essentially indistinguishable from his peasants – they are as lean in spirit as everyone else in town, even if they aren’t so poor. In ...”

“... and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable allusion. While he was ...”