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“... the tradition of pastoral romance to which Mediterranean Food belonged. Like Leach’s Japan and William Morris’s Middle Ages, it offered if not an innocent then a simpler world, ‘small and white and clean’, the sort of other Eden with which the English and at times the Scots have consoled themselves ever since they ...”

“... Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that ...”

“... the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ‘desired it to be known that it was by the consent of his eldest son, William Corbett Roberts, who is already well provided for, that nothing is ...”

“... nicks the jelly, it’s all commandingly impersonal. The servicing of ‘the soft machine’ (as William Burroughs called the body) proceeds to anaesthetising muzak, and tomorrow or the next day my mother, only a little sore, will start to see the world again through her new synthetic lens. For me, there will just be a faint twinge, thinking how this keyhole ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... for these dashing chaps, who, while they had the insouciant air of fighter pilots, sought the white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while ...”

“... years (except in a few references to the Normans), but about four hundred. He credits Gilbert White, writing in the late 18th century, with being one of the first writers to praise the loveliness of trees. This won’t do. John Evelyn, a century before, had spoken of beeches making ‘spreading trees and noble shades with their well-furnish’d and ...”

“... Yes, he’s madly upper crust. In the minority were those impressed, such as Stephen Spender and William Plomer. Betjeman wrote to the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His publisher hoped to steer ...”

“... At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady. If she appeared to the Tory faithful as a painfully nostalgic evocation of the glory ...”

“... libertarian paternalism of the Cameron and Obama governments gave us Brexit and Trump instead. As William Davies observes in Nervous States, ‘democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling,’ and ‘nostalgia, resentment, anger and fear’ appear to be taking over the world. There has been endless speculation about the reasons for this, much of ...”

“... of ‘time and motion’ studies to analyse labour productivity. The British psychologist William McDougall and the young W.H.R. Rivers devised laboratory tests to measure fatigue, which correlated with reduced hours of sleep and revealed rates of chronic insomnia far higher than anticipated. The causes of sleeplessness were obvious and largely ...”

“... the Presidential jet together with her personal maid. To the 220 sets of china she ordered for the White House at $1000 a set, just when Reagan was cutting welfare. To the $46,000 wardrobe she wore for the Inauguration in 1980, accepted as a gift from couturiers who wanted the cachet of dressing her. Here is a guide to arriviste style and greed: and we are ...”

“... much more unstable and challenging model – Shakespeare. The process is fairly familiar, but R.S. White, the author of two excellent books on Shakespearean romance and tragedy, has examined it in detail and come up with a host of fresh examples and insights. His book makes a good complement to John Barnard’s more general but also innovative study in the new ...”

“... of Russians, Indians, Irishmen, suffragettes, anarchists and troublemakers of all kinds. He rode a white charger at the head of suffrage marches, and carried himself with such distinction that he was called the Grand Duke. To top it all, when I read his diary I discovered he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I ...”

“... But the healing aspect was still just as prominent: Alice James, neglected sister of Henry and William, found temporary relief through hypnosis during her terminal cancer. She viewed it quite differently from du Maurier’s character: hypnosis, she dictated to her diary, seemed to have opened up ‘a vast field of therapeutic possibilities’ – though ...”