“... sides. We are going to live in a garret.’) The forthcoming marriage occasioned a long letter to John Hilton, a schoolfriend who offered to intercede between MacNeice and his prospective in-laws, the Beazleys. It comes as a relief and a shock to read it. Here, at last, is the intimate voice: here goes: Apologia pro Vita Mea. Only not even an apologia. (You ...”

“... art. Mary Wollstonecraft was governess to the Kingsborough daughters for a while, and an under-cook called Claridge later opened a hotel in London. If the demonic, macabre stuff of Gothic proves alluring, it is partly because the devil has all the best tunes. But why? For traditional theology, virtue is a matter of energy and enjoyment, and evil mere ...”

“... to pin up her back hair, and was never seen again. Before this matter is cleared up, the body of a cook has been retrieved from a nearby river, unaccountably separated from the corset that held it in place: it is left to Laura Menzies to bring this garment to light, which she does by going swimming in midwinter near the spot. Athletic behaviour is one of ...”

“... and soccer, rugby and cricket – and his cultural highlights depend on there being a woman to cook dinner and tend children while the typical Englishman is at the pub or on the playing field. What does his ‘matey’ image of England offer a woman? Dr Allison is right to deprecate the guidance of economists, whose science has turned out to be very ...”

“... marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic ...”

“... at the most straightforward level of weighing and measuring. It was an indication of the antiquary John Aubrey’s remarkably curious mind that he wanted to find out his height and weight. His careful accounts of weigh-ins take note of what he was wearing, whether he was carrying a sword and what he had in his pockets. When it came to his height, however, he ...”

“... to inflict Christianity on China) these journeys were about booty and empire. Not until Captain Cook’s South Pacific voyages at the end of the 18th century was an expedition of discovery undertaken largely for its own sake: for knowledge, for scientific information and – he had an official artist on board – for a complete visual record. ...”

“... book on Lord Anson’s circumnavigation of the world, a significant new biography of Captain Cook by Nicholas Thomas, and many other substantial works. John Sugden and Andrew Lambert have just produced biographies of Horatio Nelson, and a further biography by R.J.B. Knight is eagerly awaited. The Royal Navy is doing ...”

“... shock for many. The middle-class or professional family that before 1939 would expect to employ a cook, a maid and a cleaner could in most cases no longer afford to do so. Women in their forties had suddenly to learn to fend for themselves and they discovered that, in addition to being boring, housework is also quite difficult. Extended families played a ...”

“... the French commissariat far behind its commander, whose hunger had to be satisfied with what his cook had to hand: a scrawny chicken butchered with a sabre, some eggs, tomatoes, oil, garlic and a few crayfish. Such is the legend of the origin of chicken Marengo. Less well known is the effect of the same battle on physics. In the scientific story, as in the ...”

“... women were pregnant and probably hungry. They gave chase to the creature, hoping to catch it and cook it, but the rabbit got away – as did a second one. Months later, having reportedly dreamed about and frantically desired that elusive meal, Toft started to bleed heavily. Various substances ‘came away’ from her, including what she described as ‘a ...”

“... from Orange County called Maria Bodine, who had been impregnated by her employer, Joseph Cook, a widower. The trial offers insights into the way a 19th-century abortionist went about her business. Cook started having sex with Bodine a month after she became his housekeeper; she found herself ‘in the family ...”

“... off his debts by working on big-budget projects like Papillon (1973). Dalton Trumbo (1977), Bruce Cook’s genial and thorough biography, suggests that the life he designed for himself ‘rivals, and really surpasses any literary work he has undertaken’. He was born in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1905. His father was a gentle, bookish, bee-keeping shop ...”

“... the convent school, pubescence, sex education, weak mother, aggressive father, bad-talking cook, skeleton in familial trunk – with a fresh and exciting tread. Lisa St Aubin de Teran has Lisaveta hear César’s introduction of himself as ‘C’est ça’ and the ‘carcel’ (‘prison’) he speaks of in Spanish as a ‘castle’. Clare Boylan ...”

“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”