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“... with sunflowers; on the cover of A Country Calendar a round-limbed family lounges among ferns. Margaret Lane’s introduction talks of ‘small country masterpieces’ and ‘delightful reading’. In Flora Thompson’s case, the less delight, the better the story. ‘Heatherley’ begins with the 20-year-old Flora Thompson arriving at the post office ...”

“... is raised that the sturdily ineloquent mill-owner Mr Thornton can rise to the rhetorical level of Margaret Hale: I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit . . . We hate to have laws made for us at a distance. We wish people would allow us ...”

“... Brick Lane used to be the home of the dead. For centuries it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence ...”

“... models of Adolf Hitler and the National Front’s Martin Webster. The route passed Brick Lane, scene of recurring clashes between the Front and the local Bengali population. Red Saunders was the compère. He had grown enormous sideburns, and wore a hat covered in badges and a ‘Mr Oligarchy’ cape. The punk singer-songwriter Patrik Fitzgerald came ...”

“... Shakespearean associations, invisible but well attested. Down an alleyway running south off Carter Lane lies New Bell Yard. Now dominated by the glass-fronted atrium of the Grange St Paul’s Hotel, this was formerly the site of the Bell Inn. In the 1590s its landlady was a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a Stratford businessman ...”

“... Betjeman, who would have adored subtle pentameters like ‘The irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were not published as her own until her death, Aurora Leigh is a remarkable tribute to the way in which new female ...”

“... not Transport, the round sans serif typeface designed for highway signs in the late 1950s by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir. The official script is Pavement, an elongated form of Transport, but it’s only a guide: nearly all the shapes and lettering on road surfaces are hand-painted. Reading the roads every day, you begin to notice the different ...”

“... The accused had to be coerced into submission or die. The most famous case in England was that of Margaret Clitherow, who in 1586 was charged with harbouring Catholic priests in her home. It took her 15 minutes to die, crushed under a load of nearly 800 lbs. In 1721, a judge at the Old Bailey sentenced two supposed highwaymen, Thomas Cross and William ...”

“... rebirth, and the account of the 19th-century grandeur, and 20th-century transformation, of Park Lane. The delicious effect of all this is to make the reader an eavesdropper on architects at work and aristocrats at play. We meet Robert Adam giving 26 Grosvenor Square its magnificent 18th-century interiors; J.T. Wimperis concocting his splendid fin-de-siècle ...”

“... with which I would hail the thin smoke of a Gypsy wagon curling among the trees in some country lane, or the delight I experienced when “drawing out” some venerable Gypsy’. The Gypsy had to be venerable because the Rai had set himself to reconstruct the ‘deep Romani’ which lay behind the broken modern dialects, and could be found only among the ...”

“... as too womanish, and in the tradition of such other feminist intellectuals as Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Beatrice Webb, regarded her stories and poems as sugar-coated pills. ‘I have never made any pretence of being literary,’ she wrote in the autobiography; and even describing her own life did not interest her very much, for ‘my real ...”

“... time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic ...”

“... silence. That was The Ice Age (1977), but there are very similar passages in The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble’s later novels are settled, capacious, Condition-of-England chronicles, prolonged ruminations on the way we live now. Echoes of the classic novelists are much in evidence. There is an abundance of lists of small facts and of local colour, and ...”

“... specialist scandal sheets in business. One of the most entertaining was Robinson v. Robinson and Lane. Henry Robinson had read his wife Isabella’s diary and found that not only did she dislike him intensely but she had recorded in considerable detail a passionate affair with Edward Lane, the doctor at whose cure ...”

“... the idea of the enemy within: not in the sense of a mole working for a foreign power, or the way Margaret Thatcher thought of the miners, but of conflicts between ambitious actors struggling for supremacy at one government agency or another. In Dead Lions, Diana Taverner, head of operations at the Park (Kristin Scott Thomas on the telly), says to a ...”