“... April 2016, 978 0 241 96366 1)The Brontës: A Life in Letters by Juliet Barker (Little, Brown, 464 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4087 0831 6)Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World by Lyndall Gordon (Virago, 325 pp., £20, October, 978 0 349 00633 8)Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis (Chatto & Windus, 343 ...”

“... in 16th-century portraits; or perhaps a younger – and far slighter – version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan ...”

“... a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of ...”