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“... of Ragnar Lothbrok’, in the other camp ‘lay a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more ...”

“... going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week). Blondness might be thought to matter to the Conservatives of south Oxfordshire: what better tonic for the blue-rinse brigade than to trade in Tarzan’s greying mane for Boris’s floppy fair ...”

“... stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.’ Here, too, was David Craig, groping through a wilderness in Morvern in search of a long-abandoned hamlet; his treasure-trove the remains of eight little houses, their stones covered with ‘whiskery grey lichens’. A hundred pages on, our intrepid explorer is being driven ...”

“... At a stretch, the metaphor could also stand for the conventional view of Miller’s career: a sturdy quartet of well-carpentered plays that caught the spirit of mid-century America, followed by a long, increasingly unfocused, foggy tail. Rejected in his own country, the one-time toast of Broadway has finally to rely for validation on the subsidised ...”

“... was preceded by Paris (1810-13), where he spent a year ‘beneath the eye’ of Jacques-Louis David. Here he received the full stamp of French neoclassicism. But David, whom Eckersberg described as a ‘very rigorous and precise teacher’, was also ‘against submission to one particular overall style’, and ...”

“... C.R.W. Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Together they are the subject of David Boyd Haycock’s compelling group biography, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009), and now also of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (until 22 September). Gertler became obsessed with Carrington. Nash was in ...”

“... and dominated popular understanding of the nations’s common past for more than half a century. David Cannadine’s characteristically spirited and combative study is more than just an intellectual biography: it is a work of piety, advocacy and passion. He uses the corpus of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the ...”

“... was a cheap fuck. In one lampoon a patriotic prostitute offers to lower her prices for sturdy citizens: ‘Dix-huit sous, au lieu de vingt-quatre; c’est à quoi se réduit mon con national.’ The Invention of Pornography is a worthy and a scholarly book, though its sober feminist tone does rather have the effect of disinfecting the material it ...”

“... writes his Guide to the Lakes (1835), which idealises the hill farmer as the type of the sturdy Englishman, neither drudge nor parasite. Ruskin is drawn by what he sees as the acme of terrestrial beauty and ensconces himself above Coniston Water as a grumpy sage. With Canon Rawnsley of Wray near Windermere, and following Wordsworth’s lead, he ...”

“... who took it in turns to look after them. In their ancestral country they were expected to become sturdy and sporty and to think British. Kipling, who was sent to a boarding-house and allowed to see his aunts only at Christmas, wrote the most harrowing account of such an exile in his story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. But many others, Richard Rhodes James for ...”

“... The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art ...”

“... When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ This sturdy piece of advice becomes a refrain in Spike Lee’s new movie, Inside Man, where it is ludicrously literalised by the attempt of a bin Laden nephew to purchase an apartment in Manhattan, and grimly moralised in the story of an American banker who made a fortune by trading with the Nazis, and indeed by trading on the suffering of the Jews ...”

“... more extreme. The charitable impulses of Dorchester’s citizens were, at the same time, stirred. David Underdown has discovered in Dorchester an outpouring of philanthropy on an extraordinary scale, unrivalled in England. Here was a town of only 2500 inhabitants which gave, in the fight for Christ against Antichrist, £150 for the defence of their ...”

“... In​ Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, David Farrier reaches into the past in order to envisage the deep future. This can only ever be an extrapolation of the present – our knowledge, experience, language and ideas – but Farrier is relaxed about this. His focus is on the way life has been recorded in the substance of the world, the ways we can trace human impact and the ways we, in turn, might be traced in time to come ...”

“... with a baby – the youngest victim, aged four weeks. To one side a huge granite plaque on sturdy alloy stanchions lists the names of all the known dead in raised metal letters, with a note that some of the vittimi could not be identified. The coming of spring is signalled by dark purple flowers under the trees. The spaces between the bare trunks have ...”