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“... not private life. It was left to a couple involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, the architect Charles Henry Bourne Quennell and his wife, Marjorie, a painter, to produce four volumes of an immensely successful History of Everyday Things in England, published between 1918 and 1934. Addressed to teenage readers, and wonderfully illustrated by the Quennells ...”

“... hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced ...”

“... snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple ...”

“... Take the entry on Mary Kennard where the Companion records that she was the daughter of one Charles Faber ‘not Samuel Laing, as sometimes claimed’. The Laing claim is made in my Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (which also has a grotesquely wrong date of death for Kennard) and in R.L. Wolff’s Nineteenth-Century Fiction, A Bibliographical ...”

“... suffrage, if not in votes for women as well. These dissenters from orthodoxy were not followers of Charles Bradlaugh or even Chartists, but simply the Victorian working class. All the evidence suggests that the average secular and democratic British citizen of the late 20th century, visiting the 19th century in a time machine, would find a congenial atmosphere ...”

“... modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal authority of a state church preaching supernatural Christianity. Wright and Cowling have much in common in their alienation from society ...”

“... at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his brother, Charles I’. At the same time a certain value, undefinable in economic terms, came to be attached to the ownership of paintings which had no equivalent in the ownership of lace gowns or silver-plate – or even palatial dwellings. And almost certainly this ...”

“... I shall become some man’s mistress and live with him’. Soon enough she took up with Charles Gibson Cowan, an actor and writer of rumpled good looks and working-class origins, whose appeal had a frisson of rough trade. It was with Cowan that David embarked on the most dramatic episode of her life. Just how naive it was to set off for Greece in a ...”

“... the other luminaries, many of whom pass through his pages leaving hardly a trace. David Frost, Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of ...”

“... attitudes were formed by Irish nationalism (of the John O’Leary school) and modified by William Morris socialism, democracy, Toryism and Fascism. These last four, it appears, were flirtations: nationalism was the abiding passion. When Yeats sought to develop it into a political philosophy, he came up with something more akin to the Burke of the 1790s than ...”

“... She was born in 1877 in California, the fourth and last child of Mary Dora Gray and Joseph Charles Duncan, who divorced when she was a baby. Her father was a poet, editor, banker and ladies’ man who made and lost four fortunes and died in a shipwreck. ‘All my childhood,’ she writes, ‘seemed to be under the black shadow of this mysterious father ...”

“... Star Chamber was not averse to having unauthorised new houses pulled down. In the 1630s, during Charles I’s ‘personal rule’, two developments occurred. The better-known one was the building of Covent Garden, the first London square, erected under royal licence to the designs of the royal architect, Inigo Jones, and soon to set the model for the style ...”

“... this saga. The cover of The Fellowship flourishes the names of two of them – Owen Barfield and Charles Williams – alongside those of Tolkien and Lewis. Barfield had become friends with Lewis when they were undergraduates, and was later a frequent companion on his walking tours of rural England and his favourite antagonist in debates. Barfield’s chief ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing to the ...”