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“... vessel. The circumnavigation of the globe he later undertook to complete his training left no mark on him, except the tattoos he acquired in Japan and Jerusalem. More significant was the lifelong punctilio about dress and deportment he learned from his superiors, which shaped his peculiar combination of rigidity and passivity.Shooting filled the gap left ...”

“... for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so led eventually to the abdication. Adrian Tinniswood, whose book combines a panoramic view of life and architecture in the interwar years with pin-sharp detail and the sort of springy prose that comes with a complete command of the material, takes ...”

“... jazz age. This was perhaps the only period in which women who looked like Schiaparelli and Wallis Simpson, with their hefty, dynamic profiles, could have been leaders of fashion. Women were prominent in the world of haute couture between the wars. As well as Schiap, as she was known, there were Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin. Schiaparelli’s ...”

“... the new edition the classical sensibility that has often illuminated studies of Jonson makes its mark, most prominently in Colin Burrow’s editing of the poetry. Jonson’s allusions are not merely noted but felt.* Yet how widely will the feeling travel? Has the decline of classical education shamed us by restricting Jonson’s appeal? Or is Jonson’s ...”

“... and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders. As the film (which is based on a novel by Susanna Moore) unfolds, and the relationship is depicted in ever more lurid bedroom poses, Fran begins to suspect that the cop himself is ...”

“... at which she was understandably annoyed. Since the abdication crisis he had preferred Mrs Simpson, who had the desirable glamour, to ‘that blousy woman … grinning Lizzie’ but with time he came round to her, and on discovering that the ‘Queen Mother likes queens’ he began his famous annual lunches for her at the Athenaeum. When it became ...”

“... he slept badly, was nervous and irritable. His self-confidence was shaken. Should he try to make a mark in London literary circles? No, he detested the log-rolling and backbiting. Should he become more of a courtier and build on his ode sung at the Coronation of Edward VII (or rather, as he observed, not sung, by a choir which gawped at the King in the ...”

“... from the Wordsworths. For de Quincey courted, and eventually married, a local girl called Margaret Simpson. The Wordsworthian response, which had been territorial in the case of the ‘moss-house’, now became directly censorious. Like Hazlitt in a later incident, de Quincey had brought libidinousness to a terrain dedicated to the ideals of Tory, paternalist ...”

“... said to be overgrown and eroded now, but somehow to see the place that supplied the stone and the mark the men made who quarried it seems much more evocative than the actual wall itself. Instead we buy a couple of George III country chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 ...”

“... poets who are poor, miserable and mad, who amount to nothing. For the purposes of wit, the Habbie Simpson stanza form, used in ‘The Vision’, is a vehicle which can on occasion serve almost as well as the heroic couplet. Burns says here that so far in his life he has ‘done nae-thing’ except write poems, while the Lass of Ecclefechan complains elsewhere ...”

“... matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the potting-shed and coming away. Except then I call in at the church which is full of the sound of hoovering, a friendly grey-haired man, Welsh, who may be the vicar, though I don’t like to ask, seemingly ...”

“... for its clientele: Humphrey Bogart! Marlene Dietrich! Fred Astaire! The Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson! Each customer was measured, and the findings entered in a series of ledgers known as the ‘Feet Books’; the bespoke shoemakers then modelled wooden lasts to be used to make the shoes; these effigies were labelled with the client’s personal number ...”

“... the restrictions of what it contained and, resisting all impatient access, leaving the intractable mark of genius on it, in more, and more unforgettable, images than any other novel ever written. Proust aimed at the sublime. His addiction to hyperbole could become a lame – on occasion even an absurd – striving for it: few passages in Western literature ...”

“... give at short notice ‘a small dinner for about 120’). The talk was all about the king and Mrs Simpson, with few of those present believing that Edward would abdicate to marry her. On 3 December the news of the abdication broke. For Channon, Edward ‘could not have more clumsily mismanaged his affairs; he had only to lie, to prevaricate until after the ...”

“... sheep. A picture of Will’s son holding a prize ram hangs beside a grandfather clock made by Simpson of Cockermouth, and an old barometer pointing to Rain. ‘This is a farming community from way back,’ Will said, ‘but they’re all getting too old now. Young men with trained dogs are a rarity, and hill farming, of all kinds, needs young ...”