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“... Powell grew up amid the ‘hop poles, oasts and orchards’ of the Kent countryside, as Alexandra Harris writes in her contribution to the collection. In A Canterbury Tale, he used the landscape to show an unchanging pastoral England. But since the film was scripted by Pressburger, an exile who knew the unrelenting force of modernity, it becomes ‘an act of ...”

“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since early in the war, working as a lamp-trimmer. He was good pals with an assistant cook called James Wilson McGinlay, who was a bit younger. McGinlay’s father was a coachman at Milton, in Glasgow, a fact which eventually ...”

“... to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman ...”

“... a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming height in 1588, when he returned ...”

“... eldritch folksy pop music transfers to Australia in a welter of guitars, penny-whistles, Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, drugs, inspiration and greed. All this casts a spell on the escapist Richard Miller. Darcy, spokesman for an alternative theology, had learnt that there were ‘two people inside me: one who was weak and sentimental; the other somebody who ...”

“... for forgery, involving a sum of £4000, his companion on the scaffold was a youth called Joseph Harris who had robbed the Islington coach, his booty consisting of two half-sovereigns and some silver. The sight of this 15-year-old, clutched by his grey-haired father, a swooning Lear-like figure, almost upstaged the spectacle of the town’s most fashionable ...”

“... in Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar. It is repeated in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust and is used in D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, both of which Darville admits having read. Five days later, subterranean whispers of plagiarism had turned into a shriek. Not only did The Hand That Signed the Paper open with a sentence that appears to have been cribbed from ...”

“... at the Bedford Assizes in February 1658, probably following a complaint from the local vicar, Thomas Becke, who was a Presbyterian. Bunyan’s legal torments began in earnest when he was invited to preach at the hamlet of Lower Samsell on 12 November 1660. When he got there, a friend told him there was rumoured to be a warrant for his arrest, but he ...”

“... in 1818. In October 1823, at a masked ball in Liverpool, a local newspaper reported: ‘Mr Harris, of Preston, personated (we are told) Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. His appearance was most singular. His dress was of variegated colours, one half dark, the other light. His face was of different hues, the colours running insensibly into each ...”

“... of the literature of contemporary social analysis ranging from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement ...”

“... by the pathos and surprising detail of lives rarely chronicled elsewhere. There is poor René Harris, a Catholic organ-maker in Augustan London eager to improve himself. We learn that someone this marginal nonetheless wanted and was able to commission a portrait of his wife. But it was while he was away mending organs to pay for such status-objects that ...”

“... from the sand, the way they had watched their mothers glean loose sheaves from the fields. Thomas Peck, a labourer, gathered around twelve pounds of raisins, ‘which he did put into the sleeves of his coat and carry home with him’. The wife of Henry Harvest found only half that number, with ‘a great deal of gravel and sand amongst them’. The ...”

“... Command. Nigel Williams, born in 1948, belongs to a generation which grew up while ‘Bomber’ Harris and his boys were still busily winning the war on celluloid and in paperback. To Amos, however, Britain’s ‘just war’ is as morally ambivalent as every previous episode of his life. The concentration on 13 February 1945 as focal point is evidence of ...”

“... Austen’s more outrageous witticisms come together, as he points out, shortly after the death of Thomas Fowle: Cassandra, he suggests, may have needed a sort of epistolary shock treatment. When Honan enters upon psychological speculation, however, the results are mostly conventional. The shy girl is ill at ease with strangers, finds security in her ...”