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“... out doing something that made him seem a bit déclassé. Bergonzi discusses Bloomsbury or Bennett, Wells or Wyndham Lewis, Davie or Fredric Jameson, in the same informed, unassertive tone; the most memorable essay is actually an attack on Terry Eagleton, but the manner remains moderate even as the shafts go home. Bergonzi has obviously made a bourgeois ...”

“... were deemed ‘injurious’ to Shakespeare’s ‘matchless wit’. Samuel Phelps’s Sadler’s Wells production in 1854 was the only notable 19th-century performance of the play, and sought to dazzle audiences away from incest by presenting a series of spectacular scenic displays, including (in the words of the Examiner’s theatre critic Henry ...”

“... He was consigned to solitary confinement in the ‘horrible hell’ of Vincennes. ‘I am in a tower locked up behind 19 iron doors, my only source of light being two little windows each outfitted with a score of bars,’ he wrote. ‘For about ten or twelve minutes a day I have the company of a man who brings me food. The rest of the time I spend alone ...”

“... were arrested and tried. Some were imprisoned and eleven were executed by firing squad in the Tower of London. By 1916 the enemy agents had been rooted out and Matheson was sent to establish a similar operation in Rome. What she felt about her war work is impossible to know, but she did it efficiently. Something may be deduced from the fact that, having ...”

“... its erasure, and alleging its replacement by an environment which may be even worse – by tower blocks filled with heroin and despair. The trouble is that the allegation has begun to seem convincing. ‘The hovels and the vennels’ of the 19th-century Scottish city have been projected into the sky; the lower depths of the Thirties have not gone from ...”

“... when he was 14. I can think of no other biography of an Englishman – except perhaps that of Wells – in which women appear to be so necessary to a man’s life. But even in 1957 things were not easy. Although he had made it to the AA, his girlfriend, Georgie Cheeseman, had just ended a relationship which was to set the pattern for the sexual ...”

“... victory at Culloden, and to the frightful doggerel of hastily composed odes. At the New Wells in Clerkenwell, ‘Miss Lincoln made her entrance in the role of Liberty. Urging England to “droop no more”, she reviled “the wretched, mean, enervate Race’ of Scots”.’ Handel wrote a tune for a loyal recruiting song (‘Stand Round, My Brave ...”

“... for centuries before the British arrived two hundred years ago. (Ghosh described the Burmese oil wells in his 2000 novel The Glass Palace, which he quotes from here.) After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and ...”

“... bombing was enhanced as a terrifyingly real tragedy when home footage appeared. The drama of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman’s disappearance was heightened when CCTV footage appeared of the girls crossing a sports club car park in Soham at precisely 6.17 p.m. These images have a very different bearing from reconstructions and reported events: they give the ...”

“... reproduction of a veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tyres’. H.G. Wells, at the start of the cycling craze, was quick to recognise the liberating possibilities of this new technology. In The Wheels of Chance, a draper’s assistant uses his annual holiday to take to the roads of Surrey and Sussex, where he encounters a young ...”

“... work didn’t place one of his more exotic studies on the title page, but an image of a water tower, a well and a trough – three ways the Turks controlled the water supply. As a Northern European with experience of the Netherlands as well as his native Denmark, Lorck knew the importance of hydraulic engineering, and later in his life worked on projects ...”

“... their former head gardener in an attempt to make sure that Mrs Leonard had not gone to Malvern Wells to see the country house which Ladye and John had owned, the layout of which is endlessly and confusingly discussed in the séances. Their ingenious explanations of Feda’s more inaccurate remarks merely betray their determination to believe the wily Mrs ...”

“... the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism (Pound, Lewis, Eliot, Joyce). It also has much to say about the commercialisation of literature during the period, about literary agents, about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one ...”

“... 1952 choked bankers and paupers alike (it brought a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells to a close because no one could see the stage). In the years immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over ...”

“... remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like the Vicars’ Close at Wells they turn out to be medieval. The church of course is medieval, too, with over the wall, and just visible in a traditional configuration of church and state, the manor house, home of the Horners. Opposite the church door is Munnings’s equestrian statue of ...”