“... with one of those monosyllabically titled best-sellers filled with fashion tips (‘The Queen would not agree to extravagant expenditure on her clothes and neither did I’) wine-dark prose and exotic settings, as others on their uppers have done before her. She writes to Bob in 1981 after their final ...”

“... to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her commands are caresses.’ As with Ambrose Heath’s idea of ...”

“... to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was. The two things people know about Antonia White are that she wrote Frost in May and that she was a disgraceful mother. Some doubtless know it the other way around. Mud sticks. And Chitty’s Now to My ...”

“... by Peter Mil-ward, Hughes probes Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Following Milward, he notes that his mother’s family, the Ardens, were strongly Catholic, and that the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, then tried and executed. As a result, official persecution of Catholics in the area was ...”

“... with wit and malice, is full of the great and famous (the really great and famous such as the Queen, wearing ‘something one could buy in a dress-shop in the high street in High Wycombe’). The selected two hundred letters are culled from around ten thousand. I imagine that in those left unculled there is more about ...”

“... public response to an article in the Saturday Review, then by the dedication of the dictionary to Queen Victoria, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. This latter event is delayed in Winchester’s narrative by Chapter 7, on the suppliers of quotations, ‘The Hermit and the Murderer – and Hereward Thimbleby ...”

“... Her father, Albert Barney, was a millionaire in the railroad business from Dayton, Ohio; her mother, the flamboyant socialite Alice Pike Barney, a dilettante painter who studied with Whistler and not so secretly despised her philistine husband. The mother seems to have endowed Natalie with her own artiness, narcissism ...”

“... in the local cinema in Manchester, as against his less glamorous day job as a tobacconist? Was his mother really a music-hall starlet known as the Beautiful Belle Burgess? Biswell kindly remarks that no lady of that name appears on any of the playbills he’s examined. There are at least some facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his ...”

“... did happen to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s ...”

“... into the gallery of Westminster Hall. Among them appeared the cream of London society, headed by Queen Charlotte herself, elegant in fawn-coloured satin and a modest splash of diamonds, and flanked by three of her daughters. With three hundred guards keeping the passages clear, the peers of the realm marched in according ...”

“... and the crisp, American housewifeliness of Alvarez’s memoir. But of her ‘Ariel’ persona – queen, priestess, magician’s girl, red-haired woman who eats men like air, woman in white, woman in love, earth mother, moon goddess – there is no trace in the photographs. The fault may ...”

“... against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I followed the lives of divas, queens and stars; one of these was the pictorial weekly Oggi, modelled on Life, but also a harbinger of Hello! in its lurid curiosity about its rich, mostly doomed subjects. The women who appeared in its pages were ...”

“... when Nikki was killed – but born into different worlds. She had been in care, and was a single mother with four girls: Stacey, eight, Zara, three, and Niomi, nearly two, as well as Nikki. I had gone to university and was recklessly ambitious. I had hesitated before knocking on her door that first time. But I took to Sharon, whose prickly exterior is a ...”

“... crossings out, second and third thoughts, and sideways writing in the margins, were given to my mother to type. They would be revised and typed again and again.’ Transposing the usual location of domestic equipment, the Pritchetts lived out an Upstairs, Downstairs version of the literary life: he, upstairs, rolling out the sentences on the pastry ...”

“... and then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the ...”