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“... How amusing Aunt Harriet is, she is more like a weasel than ever.’ From an early age Beatrix Potter, a pretty, if disconcertingly observant child, saw the similarities between humans and other species: the childlike bravado of rabbits, the self-interest of certain cats and the unmistakeable resemblance of a middle-aged woman in a panic to a duck in a bonnet and shawl ...”

“... Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s population, as many as died in two world wars, almost ten times as many as have died in a decade of Aids. The virus, transmitted by airborne mucus and saliva, spread via coughs and sneezes ...”

“... rediscovered as a great Victorian ceramist. Appropriately, the technique in which he excelled as a potter, lustre, is one that has itself been several times lost, rediscovered and discarded again by different civilisations. It requires a mixture of artistry and chemistry for which De Morgan was ideally suited. He was born in 1839, one of the seven delicate ...”

“... Still Life is the second in a trilogy of predominantly realist novels about the extended Potter family. It details the cerebral and romantic struggles of the clever middle-class sisters Frederica and Stephanie, educated at Cambridge in the 1950s. In contrast, The Biographer’s Tale is a lush celebration of allusive and imaginative metaphor: rich ...”

“... well disposed to transgression. Having fallen in love with a 15-year-old aspiring actor called Elizabeth Malet, but being uncertain of her father’s consent to their marriage, he abducted the young woman, a crime that could be punished by execution. The king had Rochester committed to the Tower, and restored him to favour only after the young nobleman had ...”

“... under his signature. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a small flood of memoirs – of which Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994) was the most notable – and published correspondence and interviews with his friends showed him full of acid-tongued contempt for the stupidities of Soviet bureaucracy. Even the famously patriotic ...”

“... published in 2008, 2009 and 2010, and by 2012 their sales had broken the record set by the Harry Potter books. The four movies – strange how three keeps becoming four in the film world – appeared in 2012, 2013, 2014, and last month. The Roman themes are everywhere and that’s what the games are about, except that the people just get the circus, no ...”

“... penumbra of monastery buildings, complete enough to lend themselves for a scene or two in Harry Potter movies. Durham houses the tomb of early medieval Europe’s greatest historian, Bede, and that of another Anglo-Saxon monk, Cuthbert, probably a more effective bishop of Durham in death than in life. Cuthbert was also the name of the 16th-century bishop ...”

“... a luxury retirement village in the Kent countryside. Every Thursday they meet to solve cold cases. Elizabeth (who will be played by Helen Mirren in the forthcoming movie) is a retired MI6 agent, Joyce (Celia Imrie) a former nurse, Ron (Pierce Brosnan) a one-time union organiser and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) an ex-psychiatrist. Their former careers give them a ...”

“... the triple-decker cake with the solitary little sugar bride on top – for his description of Elizabeth Bishop: she is ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. It sounds farcical, but it’s strictly true, and there’s as little getting round it as there is improving on it. As I begin, therefore, I feel stirrings of a wholly impersonal desire maybe to pan ...”

“... has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance fall for a lummox like her? To which Meyer offers two answers, one conventional and one less so: because she’s the avatar of the audience, which ...”

“... Lancaster wrote a stream of nautical novels. Frank Barrett (1848-1926) was a successful potter when, in the early 1880s, his kiln collapsed, destroying two years’ work. He was persuaded in this crisis to become a novelist, and went on to write (very profitably) some fifty romances. William Alexander (1826-94) was an Aberdeenshire ploughman when an ...”

“... French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to see it with Queen Elizabeth shortly after their accession; and a few months later old Queen Mary – a true Aunt Edna type – came, too. That evening a slight hush fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a bitch’, but the old lady laughed ...”

“... John Tyndall, and many social scientists and social reformers such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). Moreover, many who could not accept the whole package of Comtean positivism still tacitly or explicitly acknowledged its intellectual inspiration. Both Darwin and Herbert Spencer, for example, appear to have worked out their own models of ...”

“... and sick by pain. The same controlled wonder is registered in the poem about the Japanese potter caught at his work in 1945 as a light breaks ‘brighter than the city’s million filaments’, or in the B52s of ‘Love in Asia’. The starkness of Paul Celan, his sense of rock-bottom desolation, are absent, but Looking into the Deep End is a modest ...”