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“... quarters. ‘She would take refuge in the laundry and curl up among the sheets and tablecloths,’ Jeanne MacKenzie writes, ‘or she would sit on the ironing-board and chat to the maids about her intention to become a nun.’ Later on, her two mentors were the ponderous and pedantic philosopher Herbert Spencer and Charles Booth the social investigator ...”

“... into which her flirtation with the other young men of his coterie had frequently plunged him. Jeanne MacKenzie suggests that he and his friends – known to the press as the Corrupt Coterie – shared the romantic fatalism of their class and were half in love with death, and for once the cliché earns its keep. ‘Corrupt’ in the modern sense they ...”

“... Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in Children of the Souls: she concentrated on Raymond Asquith, Edward Horner and six other subalterns killed in World War One. They seemed, in Diana Cooper’s view, to have no appetite for life: ‘they had grown up,’ said ...”

“... The third and final volume of the Webb diaries, which covers the period 1905 to 1924, is appropriately subtitled ‘The Power to Alter Things’. Hitherto Beatrice had been mainly the stay-at-home book-writer and social entertainer, while Sidney pursued his activities in the London County Council as well as in the London School of Economics which the Webbs had themselves founded ...”

“... The final entry in Volume One of this diary, dated 23 July 1892, left Beatrice safely married to her Sidney, but lamenting that, according to current convention, as ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’ she would lose both her names. The next entry is dated 16 August and is divided between a brief reference to two delightful days of ‘real honeymoon in the Wicklow Hills’ and interviews with trade-unionists in Glasgow and elsewhere relevant to the History of Trade Unionism, which was to be their first joint book ...”

“... him famous. He quickly came to command large advances. Here’s a sample – taken from Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie’s Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973) – of his subsequent dealings with publishers, in this case from 1899 to 1901: ‘For When the Sleeper Wakes he had £700 for the serial rights and £500 on account from Harper for the ...”

“... Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual’. For this she suffered a strong sense of guilt, as she earnestly believed that ‘whatever my mother might be, it ought not to make the slightest difference to my feelings and behaviour towards her ...”

“... Wells: Aspects of a Life, is ironical about Wells’s edifying account (followed by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie) of his ‘hard decision’ to leave the house he had built for himself in France. The truth, says West, is that Odette Keun had chucked him out. (Keun, it does strike one, was a real hell-raiser: Anthony West, however, though as an ...”

“... life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be persuaded that a public wider than that of economic historians has been waiting to learn what Shaw paid for boot dubbing (threepence) and boots ...”