“... to rabbits and steak had to be pushed through a drum sieve and, as Landemare’s contemporary Margaret Powell recalled laconically, ‘This wasn’t easy.’ Every kitchen maid’s ambition was to learn enough to move up the service hierarchy. Landemare managed this in 1901, when she went to work for Edward Dunbar Kilburn, who had made a fortune in the ...”

“... for non-payment of taxes and fines, and it was in this context that chapter 29 of Magna Carta rose to near scriptural status: ‘No freeman [for which now read person] shall be … exiled, or any other wise destroyed … but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’ Baker points out the potential relevance of this still-extant ...”

“... princess of Corinth; in revenge Medea poisons Jason’s new bride (‘murder by toxic frock’, as Margaret Atwood calls it) and kills the children she’s had with him. Ovid, Seneca and Shakespeare all draw greedily from this cup of horrors. In spite of her virulence, the figure of Medea commands our attention – and our sympathy. Dante put Jason in the ...”

“... great-grandsons of Queen Victoria: Philipp became the King of Italy’s son-in-law, and Christoph rose to a high rank in the SS. In his engrossing account of their role as mediators between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Royals and the Reich, the American historian Jonathan Petropoulos showed how their ability to smooth things over became crucial at critical ...”

“... failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper and mechanised commander, McChrystal rose quickly through the ranks. He was deployed for a few months to Afghanistan in 2002 before returning to serve in the office of the Joint Chiefs as the Pentagon’s debriefer to Congress and the press. He went on to command JSOC in Afghanistan and Iraq, and ...”

“... walls was a gamble. None currently existed – the Theatre and the Curtain were in Shoreditch; the Rose and the Swan were in Southwark. These areas lay respectively in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, beyond the writ of London’s mayor and aldermen, who generally viewed theatres as a threat to public order, health and decency. Two factors perhaps gave ...”

“... of Mansfield’s best-known stories, ‘The Doll’s House’, in its opening sentence: ‘Vera, Margaret, Charlotte Mary and KM were cleaning out the doll’s house.’ The two pieces of writing match closely: There were three dippers of water on the floor, three little pieces of real monkey brand and in their hands they held three little rags – of ...”

“... intelligence, mediated through language. In the course of the century, literacy in England rose sharply and hugely. In its immense effectiveness, this educational change could even be said to have exceeded its ends: first in the rhetorical and stylistic games of patterning that took over the writing of the time, and second in the fact that many ...”

“... birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first two children, Joan and Margaret, in infancy. The prospects for their newborn’s survival – and perhaps their own – must have seemed grim. Just a few doors down from their home on Henley Street, their neighbours the Greens would lose four of their children to the epidemic. Windows ...”

“... compromise or flattery (two supremely silly treatments). And there have been undressed dolls too. Margaret Fuller, the pioneer American feminist, wrote that ‘since Adam, there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns.’ Catherine Carswell wrote a brave, Lawrentian ...”

“... as Torrance writes, was willing to concede anything to stay in office; Torrance also quotes Margaret Bondfield, a junior minister in 1924, lamenting that the government had fallen because MacDonald ‘lost his head’. Torrance concludes that the most plausible explanation is that the prime minister had ‘simply had enough’. Certainly, he had reason ...”

“... is margarita, leading many commentators to assume that the child’s name was Margery or Margaret). He can’t even bring himself to say that she was his daughter, just that she was closer ‘than aunt or niece’. He is obsessed with his loss and has come to visit her grave. ‘Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere [a grassy plot]/My privy perle withouten ...”

“... the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from ...”

“... of its woods! After lunch we turned west, climbed the hill again through the hedges of wild rose, past gardens scented with mock-orange, stocks and lilacs – the scents were heavily intoxicating everywhere – and then dropped down through the woods to another Evenlode reach and an old stone bridge where the cattle stood up to their knees in the water ...”

“... the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this when her narrow foot was measured – size five and a half, but the left slightly longer than the right – though she understood that she would no longer be ...”