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“... herself to condemn the lynching of black males for ‘atrocities worse than death’. Similarly, Margaret Sanger, a feminist, socialist and family planner, promoted vaginal diaphragms in heroic defiance of the Comstock laws, but also urged the sterilisation of racial inferiors. Is the conjunction of race and liberal freedoms any less surreal today, when, in ...”

“... Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of ...”

“... health and the loss of their home. Bessie Bellwood, who began as a rabbit skinner in Bermondsey, rose to fame as a blowsy, loud-mouthed, proudly proletarian singer, had numerous affairs with aristocrats and narrowly avoided debtors’ prison. She died of heart disease at the age of 39. Vesta Victoria, who started as a clog dancer and made her name with the ...”

“... had to cut off their fashionable long toe-pieces when forced to fight the Swiss infantry on foot; Margaret of Parma, another illegitimate child of Charles V by a different serving wench, who grew and carefully trimmed a moustache to provide her with an air of authority when her father made her governor of the Low Countries; Princess Stephanie of Belgium (the ...”

“... gives it a very different feel to most current Western sci-fi (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood and others), which is largely pro-left. It’s not just the books’ portrayal of revolutionary groups and the state’s economic role. In the novels, the world hundreds of years in the future is still organised cladistically: America is a power ...”

“... In private he was a nonconformist, living in a cabin in the Virginia backwoods with his wife, Margaret, who had grown up among Presbyterian missionaries.As chief of the newly constituted Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff, Gottlieb set about expanding and refining Dulles’s programme. The trials on ‘expendables’, in his estimation, had ...”

“... afford it. You see, if we don’t rehearse, and if we don’t-a play, that runs into money. Margaret Dumont, most imperturbable of straight men, was the aristocratic foil to all the boys in Animal Crackers, and when the circus of Harpo reeled around her, or poked her with a stick, or got his foot caught in her sleeve, Dumont’s suffering was ...”

“... but few would agree with the strategy of immediately sending troops because George Bush and Margaret Thatcher assumed that wogs could be told to behave by the white man: there is a pattern of such contemptuous attitudes towards the Arab world, from the days of the British expeditionary force sent to Egypt in 1882 to put down the Orabi rebellion to the ...”

“... have been constructed, each with its own seductive charm. There is the Faraday publicly admired by Margaret Thatcher (and her successor no doubt), the Faraday who without the privilege of a university education but with bags of initiative rose from book-binder’s apprentice at the age of 14 to such eminence in science that ...”

“... of the principle of ‘collective responsibility’ to decay into the decorative. Indeed, Crossman rose to be Lord President of the Council, spending more time with the Queen and on ceremonial matters than any modern Tory would care to. (Incidentally, think how the tone of politics might be altered if the archaic word ‘privy’ in the title Privy Councillor ...”

“... women whom he associated with the city’s contaminating sensuousness. Recording some gossip about Margaret Fuller and her Italian lover in his notebook, Hawthorne turned on his former friend with contempt and loathing: her feeling for Ossoli was ‘purely sensual’, and she herself had a ‘defective and evil nature’. The pattern recurred in his brief, if ...”

“... the Flood and its aftermath were often resolved by appeal to the holdings of virtuosi museums. As Margaret Nickson informs us here in her helpful analysis of Sloane’s library, Wilkins’s work was one of the first folios which the young Hans Sloane purchased when he reached London as an ambitious apothecary in the early 1680s. Decades later, various drafts ...”

“... Whoever thought otherwise? The popular answer is that this was the general proposition asserted by Margaret Thatcher when she uttered this phrase – which, once uttered, she was never allowed to forget. Like many famous quotations, it has been snatched out of its original context. The fact is that in an interview with Woman’s Own in October 1987, Thatcher ...”

“... of real merit, but they would probably have been the first to admit that they were among those who rose to sanctity by clinging to the coattails, or more exactly the robes, of Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri. So much for the growth of cults at the periphery. But there is also the problem of explaining how and why some of these cults were adopted by the centre ...”

“... in Chihuahua and instructed his editors that he didn’t want Diaz touched with so much as a rose petal in his publications. None of Bierce’s fiction did well, and his publishers all went promptly bankrupt. His sons died in circumstances of squalid debauchery. His wife divorced him after a long unhappy marriage. In 1913 Bierce apologised to his friends ...”