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“... The woods around London offered some curious sights in the 1840s. To the north in Epping Forest the infant William Morris could be seen riding out in a toy suit of armour, while down in Surrey, in the Tillingbourne Valley, little Gertrude Jekyll was learning to make gunpowder. In the event it was Morris who became the political revolutionary and Gertrude Jekyll who withdrew into a secluded world of romance in the house and garden she created at Munstead Wood ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... Most people know two things about Harriette Wilson, one of which is untrue. She is rightly famous for that most tantalising of opening sentences: ‘I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of 15, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.’ With it she ushered in her Memoirs, published in 1825 as a frankly commercial venture. As well as making money in the usual way from the sales of what she wrote, she was willing and indeed anxious to take it from former friends and lovers in exchange for what she left out ...”

“... Angela Carter didn’t enjoy much of what she called ‘the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime’. She was known and admired, but on nothing like the scale that has caused her to be described since her death in 1992 at the age of 51 as ‘one of the 20th century’s best writers’ and inspired Lambeth Council to name a street in Brixton after her ...”

“... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...”

“... Every generation gets the queen mother it desires, or deserves (to adapt Jacquetta Hawkes’s remark about Stonehenge). Seemingly impassive as any megalith, she waved and smiled through a century. From blushing bride to reluctant queen to the good old queen mum, she was respected, fawned on, laughed at or detested largely according to the prejudices of the beholder ...”

“... As house prices fall and mortgage rates rise, there is a sense of unease, bordering on panic, that goes beyond economics. An idea of home that is dear to the English middle class is, it seems, under threat. Hermann Muthesius, whose Das englische Haus first appeared just over a century ago and has now been translated in full for the first time, would have sympathised ...”

“... Rosamond Lehmann was born the day after Queen Victoria’s funeral. When the First World War broke out she was 13, on holiday with her family on the Isle of Wight. The imminence of hostilities had put an end to a plan, much dreaded by Rosamond, to send her and her sister to stay with relatives in Germany. From her own point of view the war was ‘a personal and miraculous reprieve’: ‘of the world crisis, I remember only that sudden emptiness of the beach and the expression on my father’s face as he sat reading the papers all day ...”

“... Bohemia​ was never a safe country for women. If they didn’t all die of consumption in a garret, many of them might as well have done. In the 1890s, when the ‘new woman’ sprang, as Max Beerbohm put it, ‘fully armed from Ibsen’s brain’, their cases tended to follow a pattern. Attracted by the idea of freedom from social and sexual convention and the chance to live among artists, even to be artists, they found themselves not in a new world but in a mirror image of the old, with as many constraints and fewer comforts ...”

“... On​ 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world. Le Monde called it ‘a masterpiece’, ‘one of the most emblematic buildings of the emerging 20th century ...”

“... dry while Sarah struggles round the kitchen with enormous fish pies. ‘It was all very Notting Hill but fun.’ Swire congratulates Cameron on his recent ‘Falklands moment’, using his veto to keep Britain out of the EU accord designed to stabilise the Eurozone by imposing new budgetary rules on all members. He laughs and says she’s ‘such a ...”

“... Hotel by the Sea’ (1946) Three women,​ all in their way members of the higher bohemia, were having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948 ...”

“... In​ the early 1970s, an archive came to light containing what seemed to be the work of a forgotten Victorian photographer called Francis Hetling. His photographs, somewhat in the style of Lewis Carroll, gave a feeling of everyday life in the 19th century. It was decided to rescue him from obscurity with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1974 ...”

“... Queen Victoria​ reigned for 64 years, causing two and a half generations to be lumped together as ‘Victorians’. Had she died in 1870, rather than in 1901, it would be easier to see how little those generations had in common. Approaching the mid-point of the reign, in 1864, the historian J.A. Froude noticed that already ‘from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and Free-trade’ the change was ‘vast ...”

“... There are maps both in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, which deals with bohemians in general, and in Andrew Barrow’s, which is a study of two in particular, but the street plans of Soho, Paris or Munich are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly ...”