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“... make lists. In favour of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw ...”

“... that the local shipping channels are called the ‘Lower Hope Reaches’: who would have known Kent was an allegorical landscape? Another unfortunate consequence of In Zodiac Light’s dalliance with allegory is the flatness of its villains. The hospital’s hierarchy has Osborne, a shamelessly careerist acting superintendent, at its head. His chief ...”

“... have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different reasons equally doubtful.) Despite the horrors and humiliations of his upbringing as the second son of a father perversely determined that his children should ...”

“... that they should support their own families financially, yet even the dukes of Gloucester and Kent, the queen’s cousins, have always been funded by her Duchy of Lancaster income.This problem is exacerbated by generational obsolescence. As in any media-confected family, the real stars are the young people, particularly for millions of royal-watchers with ...”

“... if you google him you will see a fine picture of him by Tissot – flew in a balloon from Kent to Normandy in 1882. Four years earlier the actress Sarah Bernhardt had taken a flight from Paris to the Seine-et-Marne. Along with Nadar, these figures and their companions were, Barnes says, ‘the balloon-going classes ...”

“... possesses the power to captivate, to move, to shock and to anger. Like her near contemporaries Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Farren, Dora Jordan was born (in 1761) in humble circumstances, but with strong theatrical connections. Her parents, Grace Phillips and Francis Bland, were unmarried and her mother was herself an actress. When Dora was 13, her father ...”

“... a career that had been based on deftness, on lightness of touch. A View of Vintners at Bexley, Kent, with Mr Whatman’s Turkey Papers Mills, 1794 Living so long, and exerting the influence he did over the development of watercolour, Sandby was described, when he died, as the ‘father of modern landscape painting in watercolours’. At a time when ...”

“... the Buntings have no historical connection to the North. My mother came from Devon, my father from Kent. Nor was either side distinguished. Despite my fondness for grandeur, I’m unable to tell you what the Buntings were doing during the Reformation, or even the Counter-Reformation. As far as I can tell, our family was completely invisible, no more than a ...”

“... Green in Somerset, following the well-known examples of Robert Raikes in Gloucestershire and Sarah Trimmer in Brentford. Patty kept a journal of the years 1789-99, published as Mendip Annals in 1859 and clearly intended for general edification. According to Patty, God (‘Providence’) started it all by sending the anti-slavery campaigner William ...”

“... Robey, Harry Lauder, Dan Leno and Vesta Tilley rubbed shoulders with the likes of Sir Henry Wood, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes. Dickens was fascinated by the performing style of Charles Mathews, a blacked-up minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot revered Marie Lloyd, and the present ...”

“... sentimental heart of the British Public. It is clear that Damilola Taylor is no Princess Diana or Sarah Payne. I stop to read some of the messages with the flowers. Nearly all seem to be from people who live in and around Peckham: church groups and individuals keen to stress their ties with the place (‘I’ve lived here for thirty years,’ one of them ...”

“... Clark was a volunteer, an amateur who on the tiniest of whims could instantly repair to Kent in order to repair his moat, or to swap a few more of his daddy’s paintings for a few more vintage cars. And as to the politics, here too he was above the dreary fray. He had no real political principles but he did have quite a few well-rooted prejudices ...”

“... not a university man: he was a North Country cotton merchant and wartime army officer who had seen Sarah Bernhardt when he was 13. ‘Her acting,’ he said, ‘unveiled for me the ecstasy of the body and the torture of the mind.’ When he was 20, Agate went to Paris, to see the actress Réjane and provoke her into giving a better performance. He was devoted ...”

“... let’s go with purported fact. In just the last few years we have had the enchanting enigma of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (the most Nabokovian film yet made), Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and the landmark of Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America, the most complete and scary portrait of a very weird guy (our next comeback kid?), and a ...”

“... and remained active in radical politics for the next thirty-odd years. At the age of 19 he married Sarah Johnson, his landlady’s daughter, and she brought him enough money to establish himself in Lambeth as a bookseller and stationer. He campaigned among other things for a new, more humane system of poor relief, improvement in the management of lunatic ...”