unhistoric

The finished roll, which travelled in a big covering of unhistoric looking bubble wrap, was carefully signed by the clerk of the crown in chancery, Antonia Romeo.

Some of Spufford’s characters are, like Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, people who make the world a little bit better by their “unhistoric acts.”

“But if Boris Johnson were to ask for extra time - which probably he won’t - I would consider it unhistoric to refuse such a request.”

“But if Boris Johnson were to ask for extra time – which probably he won’t – I would consider it unhistoric to refuse such a request.”

In his chapter on George Eliot, Brooks cites the famous concluding passage of Eliot’s greatest novel, “Middlemarch,” concerning Eliot’s ardent heroine, Dorothea, with whose aspirations the book began: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”