Rosemary Hill

‘What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer,...

Above Primark, at Nos. 14­-28, is the handsome faience frontage of the former Lyons Oxford Corner House. At No. 8, above McDonalds, there is the ‘robust brick front with crowning gablet in the Waterhouse-­Romanesque manner, per­ haps of c.1880’ that was once a tailor’s or clothier’s shop. These are the traces of the changing retail patterns of the 19th century: from small to big, from individual stalls, bazaars and arcades to giant specialised emporia and department stores.

Like poison​ , the revenge memoir is a weapon of the weak. A person unlikely to prevail in an open fight will naturally resort to indirect methods. This is often the case for women, whose sex and apparent insignificance has rendered them invisible. During the Second World War it was felt necessary to run a propaganda campaign warning men that women could hear what they were saying. The...

‘Irepresent things as I see them,’ Aubrey Beardsley said, ‘outlined faintly in thin streaks (just like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins,...

There​ are more than a thousand books about Winston Churchill, but this is the first about his cook, Georgina Landemare. Since it may well also be the last, it’s fortunate that she has fallen into the sympathetic hands of Annie Gray. Gray is a food historian and she sets Landemare’s long life in the context of changes in diet and eating habits over nearly a century. The story...