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“... fact in the life of the real Elgar. In his twenties, Elgar was briefly engaged to a woman called Helen Weaver. To serve the requirements of the fictional structure, this woman becomes, in the book, Lena von Pussel, a German lady intimate with Elgar in distant days when they were both aspiring musicians, but now, at the time of the narrative, resident in ...”

“... This book is a history of the collective consciousness of the ‘Latin West’ (with this country and New England included by association or out of courtesy) during the last thousand years; its focus is death, or changing attitudes towards death, but it is part of the argument that such attitudes must be related to our feelings about many other matters ...”

“... Modernists – Vanessa Bell, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, himself, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and some others – at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, which was located on the ground floor of Poiret’s imposing residence at 109 rue Faubourg St-Honoré, next door to the Martine interior design workshop which served as the model for ...”

“... family.’ But Marcroft did not choose this. A destitute orphan, she was made pregnant by a local weaver whose father then forbade them to marry. Ill after the birth of a second child, she was forced with her children into the workhouse, where she was almost murdered by a deranged fellow inmate. She was rescued by her brother, who helped her to set up as an ...”

“... the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the ...”

“... were demanding attention he couldn’t give them. On 6 November he complained to Harriet Shaw Weaver that ‘working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half.’ He evidently decided that he couldn’t do much about the printer’s errors in time for the birthday, but he ...”

“... a date of cultish significance. It was on 19 April 1992 that a supremacist guerrilla named Randy Weaver saw his wife and child shot dead during a shootout with Federal agents in Idaho. On 19 April 1994, the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco – a leftover from the Untouchables of the Prohibition era, and a state militia that cries out for scrapping ...”

“... of nearly every protest movement known to the British Government’, from Luddites to Scotland’s weaver-Radicals, Captain Swing rioters, Tolpuddle martyrs and Chartists. Most celebrated were the ‘Scottish Martyrs’ whose monument stands in the Calton cemetery and looks down on a forgetful Edinburgh. They were casualties of the Tory hysteria of 1793, when ...”

“... radical practice, an obsessive labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until ...”

“... would be Benjamin Flint’s, and one such brothel the Whitecross Street establishment run by Helen Clare, ‘a harbourer of lewd persons’, whose girls included Mary Pilkinton, charged at the sessions of December 1613 with burying her baby in the backyard of the house. Another name to mention here is that of George Wilkins, hack author and ...”