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“... a good time, and Wilson did not so much run away as saunter off to Berkeley Craven’s house in Charles Street, reasoning that the Cravens ‘were our near neighbours, and old acquaintances, and they were gentlemen.’ She took the name of Wilson (quite why is still not clear) and from then on life was a succession of lovers. At least, according to Wilson ...”

“... of England Academy. Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia ...”

“... was ‘almost done’. Her husband, awarded honorary doctorates by Edinburgh University and Charles University in Prague, was now very much the distinguished European man of letters. After a stint at the British Council in Rome, he was appointed warden of Newbattle Abbey, a residential adult education college near Edinburgh. Willa sometimes felt ...”

“... as a figurehead. No more Queens! At the moment, the republican war is being waged against Prince Charles, using Princess Diana as a means and excuse, but that sympathy for a woman is a trumped-up and certainly an interested matter. No woman ought to think for a moment that the republican movement as represented by, for instance, the Sunday Times has any ...”

“... island, rising up out of the marshes (marécages) that surrounded it.The Mosquitoes of ArlesJohn Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France, the standard 19th-century guide, warns that Arles is unhealthy ‘at certain seasons’ because of the marshes and pools in the vicinity. Even today, there are hosts of mosquitoes clear into the month of November, and ...”

“... for publication in book form as The Espalier by Chatto and Windus in 1925. Her editor at Chatto, Charles Prentice, asked if she had anything else to hand, so she sent him the manuscript of Lolly Willowes, a novel about a witch: its publication in 1926 made her famous.* Lolly Willowes tells the story of a middle-aged spinster aunt – ‘useful and obliging ...”

“... Stone never believed that the Rosenbergs were pathetic innocents, and the late and dearly mourned Murray Kempton always thought that Hiss must have been in touch with Moscow Centre, and both of these men were tougher opponents of McCarthy than the Communist Party, with its evasions and euphemisms, ever was. Nor does this exhaust the ironies. Whittaker ...”

“... to a know-nothing government in Westminster. The Sydney Herald warned off Gipps with a reminder of Charles I’s fate. Somewhere in all this an independent Australian nation was evolving, but at what cost? Gipps was forced to condone the whitewashing of the Waterloo Creek massacre. The remaining suspects in the Myall Creek massacre got off. The Governor’s ...”

“... Wandering Jew, the Romantic uses of the legend are more immediately relevant, including that in Charles Maturin’s perfervid Gothic fiction Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which is not mentioned. The phrase ‘Holy of Holies’ is explained as ‘An allusion to the ark, the “most holy”, in the tabernacle’. The allusion is not in fact to the Ark of the ...”

“... passion for the hardware of the Second World War, and the podcast he hosts with the comedian Al Murray (We Have Ways of Making You Talk) thrives on enthusiasm for Spitfires and Shermans. In his writing, however, he keeps a tight grip and demonstrates why military technology matters. Lives depended on air superiority, the thickness of tank armour, the US ...”

“... more affluent West End. The ornate Fairfield offices designed by Honeyman and Keppie (the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh worked there at the time) now house a shipbuilding museum, but construction continues next door at BAE Systems, where Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. The yard has become a rallying point for protesters who claim BAE ...”

“... Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten 20th-century authors added to this edition is English.) The Longman translates US multiculturalism more obliquely into UK devolution, turning inward to trace cultural differences within the British Isles, from the 14th-century Welsh ...”

“... am glad you think I am better at love-making,’ Buchan wrote in a letter to Gilbert Murray. ‘I hate the stuff. I sit and blush with disgust when I am writing it.’ So flirtation and sexual tension were largely off the table as a means of punching up his dialogue. But Buchan still aimed to give his characters’ language a racy, informal ...”