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“... a beat. I think it must be Thursday, she says, because he has to go into town every day.My father Henry is tall and thin, with a tweed sports jacket. His black hair is slicked back with a patent solution. He wears spectacles and looks very intelligent, in my opinion. He brings home the Manchester Evening News.He brings home the smell on his coat of autumn ...”

“... most staunch supporters in the 1930s. Few were more unwavering in their support than his brother Henry, yet even he complained the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great ...”

“... in its detail: undergraduates on night fire-watching duty taking turns to stay awake in the bell tower of Christ Church, the smell of blackout curtains, the ominous poetry of the blackout itself, the eight-second interval between trucks in a military convoy, with a press of bicycles behind the last one. This section is written in the first ...”

“... had to be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created ...”

“... two coasts at once. The summit of Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran can be seen in the west, and the Bell Rock, smack in the Firth of Forth, is clear on the other side, down to the east. Walking up to the burial mound, Karl and I were approached by a herd of cattle. ‘Good, good,’ said Seamus, coming up and flicking them away. ‘A square-go in ...”

“... came into conflict of a thoroughly traditional and predictable kind. This conflict sharpened when Henry V of England, who had revived dynastic claims of his own to the French Crown, offered to fight alongside Burgundy. The effects were duly felt in frontier regions – raiding and thieving in and around Domrémy became frequent. In 1423, the husband of ...”

“... key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won ...”

“... out a scrupulous autopsy of the mechanical monk. Carved from poplar or beech, it has a hollow, bell-shaped body that contains its clockwork. Three wheels on the underside provide propulsion and steering while a pair of sandalled feet on the front paddle at the air to give the illusion of walking. The arms are articulated at the shoulder and elbow; the head ...”

“... ever. In the second half of her life, following her marriage in 1912 to the newspaper editor Henry de Jouvenel, the birth of her daughter, Bel-Gazou, and the beginning of her gradual transformation from scandalous cocotte into France’s most celebrated and respected woman writer, Colette moved on to a complicated series of Younger Women and Younger ...”

“... yours Respectfully                    S Walker A Scottish drunkard called Bell, who was involved in the divorce proceedings, told Mrs Hazlitt that ‘he had seen some passages’ of Sarah’s letters, ‘and they were such low vulgar milliner’s or servant wench’s sentimentality, that he wondered Mr Hazlitt could endure such ...”

“... into her bed, and stayed there for the next 22 years. One day​ in 1911, walking with Gertrude Bell, Arthur Benson mentioned to her that the composer Ethel Smyth had once said his mother was ‘as good as God and as clever as the Devil’. She laughed ‘at the profanity of it’, replying: ‘That’s one comfort about all of you – you are not in the ...”

“... was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I ...”

“... a false narrative, a doorstep is smeared with shit, a dead cat is found hanging from the bell-pull, the words assassins and a mort are daubed on the shop’s blind. The police are only half-helpful: as one investigating officer says to another, ‘It smells of Kraut in here.’ The Krulls decide – not inaccurately – that Hans is the bringer, or ...”

“... the idea that beggary was in most cases the favoured trade of the impotent lush and thieving bawd. Henry VIII’s statute against vagrancy proclaimed that ‘vacabundes and Beggers have of longe tyme increased – dayly do increase’ and allowed that justices of the peace should provide the true poor with limited licences to beg; beggars begging outside these ...”