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“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... and Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and metalwork. It was a reinvention of the country house as social force, ‘a quiet attempt to change the ...”

“... Inn, Rugeley on the exhumed body of Walter Palmer five months after his murder by his brother William, the multiple poisoner. On the removal of the outer coffin a hole was bored in the leaden receptacle in which Walter Palmer’s body was confined, and instantly a most sickening and noxious effluvium escaped, which permeated the entire building, affected ...”

“... Christian apologist, and I was, I confess, the man who had not read The Man Who Was Thursday. P.D. James, in her introduction to a selection of Father Brown stories, says: ‘Chesterton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence.’ Almost everyone reaches for the word ‘genial’ when they talk about him, and we are told that he loved to argue. All of these ...”

“... estate, and her final defiant infatuation at the age of 80 with the strapping second-rate actor William Augustus Conway. Hester’s mother had taught her only child ‘to play a thousand pretty Tricks, & tell a Thousand Pretty Stories and repeat a Thousand pretty verses to divert’ her violent, irascible and elegant father. ‘Rakish men seldom make tender ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... that one might expect to find is barely in evidence. Faraday, unlike such Oxbridge scientists as William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick or William Whewell, refrained from burdening science with proofs of design. As one who believed that knowledge of God was to be obtained through the plain teaching of Scripture, he regarded ...”

“... that anti-semitism has been, among other things, Christian. ‘I could never understand how William Empson, a poet and critic I revere, could hate Christians and especially Catholics, thinking their religion nothing but a sordid cult of blood and sacrifice. Christ’s blood was the form of his own suffering, he didn’t recommend bloodletting for other ...”

“... she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where she contacted a Cromwellian exile called William Scot, offering him a pardon in exchange for information on alleged Dutch plans to invade England with the help of other banished republicans. (Hence her routine description in literature textbooks as ‘playwright and spy’.) After this paradoxically ...”

“... for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were ...”

“... killed us’, when they were divided over Gerald Shove. Not everyone was happy to join. From James Strachey’s letters, Lubenow takes a wonderful account of the nearly botched election of Gordon Luce in 1912; asked to meet the Apostles at breakfast, ‘Luce looked wild, with bloodshot eyes and dishevelled hair. He seemed frightened, angry, and according ...”

“... when you understand all that, you may just be able to understand how they manage to present James Joyce as a man devoted to the God who was satisfied by the crucifixion.’ Whereupon he at once vaults into a new paragraph which yet keeps the previous one alive: ‘The concordat was reached over his dead body.’ It is one of his most searching ...”

“... things the Abstract Expressionists did were implied, and very often achieved, by the mid-Fifties. William Sietz’s book has no illustrations later than that, and his history does not seem truncated. He caught the movement at the point where it was becoming commercially successful. The city which had brought together de Kooning from Holland, Rothko from ...”

“... Iranians, was a case of the peasant doffing the cap to the landlord. One sees it occasionally in William Forbis’s Fall of the Peacock Throne, where he talks about the Shah’s ‘courteous concern for putting me at my ease’. But the most extreme example was a lavishly-produced book by the photographer Roloff Benny called Iran: Elements of Destiny and ...”