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“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... a former Kentucky Derby runner stabled in Pirtleville, in Arizona. As the day drew nearer, a foot-and-mouth outbreak made it impossible for either horse to be brought across the border. In those days the border fence at Douglas was not much higher than a sheep fence, and so the race went ahead in the autumn of 1958, with Relámpago running in Mexico and ...”

“... after for just long enough. You have probably never heard of Anthony Scoloker, or Ursyn Mylner, or John Gybkin or Lodowick Harbard, but Blayney reveals probably as much as it is humanly possible to know of their teeming world. When John Warwick died in York in 1542, his inventory listed not only one cow and six silver ...”

“... morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where ...”

“... arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so ...”

“... harmlessly away). Katharina’s case stalled until October 1616, when Einhorn sent a report to John Frederick, the duke of Württemberg, detailing the accusations against her, which now included hurting children. Ducal councillors ordered the governor to detain the suspect. But Katharina had already left Leonberg to be with her son in Linz. Katharina made ...”

“... that under the Reconstruction Acts the white population of the South would be ‘trodden under foot to protect niggers’. In his annual message to Congress of 1867, he declared that blacks had ‘shown less capacity for government than any other race of people’. They had never produced any civilisation and when left to themselves relapsed into ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... Field. Actors wore the military regalia of the 15th regiment of hussars and the 13th regiment of foot; there was a wood-panelled room, like the one from which the Manchester magistrates had looked out over the crowd. I walked away from the hustings to gauge whether it would be possible to hear a speaker from five hundred yards. As an exercise in historical ...”

“... I remember being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive And to be young was very heaven. Gone is the intoxicated youthful illogic, by which even ‘bliss’ can be trumped. That ‘And’ as we turn into ...”

“... but a necessary pleasure. Yet Gautam would not have changed his mind had not Anil, at five foot and half an inch, had the temerity to say: ‘Of course I’m going’ – as if it were a right it would be foolish not to exercise. If Anil, at his height, could suffer to relinquish the shield and protection of his white school uniform for the daring ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her ...”

“... whacking people.’ (Doubtless insurgents talk like this too.) Again Filkins applied a discreet foot to the pedal and one of the men came out with a ‘remarkable thing’: ‘He was describing some woman who had kind of stepped in front of – the insurgent had stepped behind her, so he said, yeah, he shot this woman, and he said, “The chick got in the ...”

“... that the extra information in the painted images, even to a degree in the photographed ones like John Coplans’s black and white prints, can bear being looked at for longer. There are colours the projector cannot match, there is information about how the painter used his hands, how he responded to the task of showing what an eye or a ...”