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‘Yarg’ is simply ‘Gray’ spelled backwards, the cheese being named after the artisan cheesemakers Alan and Jenny Gray, who found a 1615 recipe for a nettle-wrapped semi-hard cheese in a book in their attic.

Jenny had saved the precious grains of sand in an empty Colman’s mustard jar and when she left home and married Simon she had taken the jar with her. Now and then, when she feels herself disappearing into his or Charlotte’s life, a minor character in their stories, she holds the jar to the window and watches the light glinting off the tiny crystals

Names ending in an “a,” often with a foreign derivation, had become popular in England; “Julia” and “Louisa,” which Jane Austen herself uses as character names, both first came into use there in the eighteenth century and were still not very common.

So far her improvement was sufficient—and in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte,43 of her own composition,44 she could listen to other people’s performanc

Someone, thought the deputy, whose origins were working class, had almost certainly been at school with someone else. Professor Somerville’s father with the Ambassador’s cousin, perhaps . . . There would have been those exchanges by which upper-class Englishmen, like dogs round a lamppost, sniff out each other’s schooling – faggings at Eton, beatin

The era of ancient genomics, though, suddenly provides us with the opportunity to explore these questions of hierarchy and kinship in a very detailed way that has simply not been possible before: tomb by tomb, hill by hill, valley by valley.

Perhaps it’s better I lay down my arms and leave the field of battle where I only ever lost – perhaps it’s better to live with hope than disappointment:

In his heart he knew that he would never be able to endure torn-out fingernails or electrocution or suffocating indefinitely in a congested cell or being forced to walk over rotting corpses. Probably he would just die after his first session. He closed his eyes, oddly reassured by this. He, at least, would leave behind a corpse with no last will or

Death feels like God snapping his fingers. It’s always the same. The old sorcery flies out of him like a raven bursting free of a pie, and the spell is broken. His bones remember their age and turn accordingly to dust. There is always the briefest of moments, while his skin is still curling into parchment, when he can feel the morbid wrongness of i