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“... successful friends and colleagues: pampered, chatty, good-looking Gaby; preening, manipulative Judith, Dorothy’s former PhD supervisor; and Elyse and Alexandra, both of whom have the kind of university job that Dorothy tells herself she can’t hope for. She doesn’t hope for much else either. Instead, she watches and listens to herself and reports ...”

“... Chesterton’s purple rhetoric and detect metaphysical value in the mannerist posturings of Father Brown. But it’s a rarity. As Hanaud says, ‘I deal with very great matters, the liberties and lives of people who have just that one life in that one body.’ Mrs Lassiter is a suburban housewife whose daydreams take the form of self-pity at her own arrested ...”

“... that the novelists often availed themselves of single traditional physiognomic correspondences: brown or black eyes are the sign of physical or moral strength; blue eyes belong to gentle characters; ‘strong characters are almost always dark-haired’ while ‘fair hair is often assigned to characters of an essentially gentle nature’ although it is ...”

“... to live at any kind of obscure urban address, such as 24 Whitfield Road, Haslemere.’ The writer Judith Kerr, who had fled the Nazis with her family and ended up boarding at Hayes Court, was asked by two girls: ‘Did your nanny have a Cockney accent? Because we’ve all been discussing it and we’ve decided your vowels aren’t pure.’ Amanda ...”

“... thirty years, this has changed. ‘Garden history has been overly aristocratic,’ declared Jane Brown, whose Pursuit of Paradise (1999) proposed a social history of gardening that could be both ‘popular and nostalgic’. She took her inspiration from G.M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, referring to the delights of his medley of topics: ‘the state ...”

“... and Democracy’ in his wonderfully measured new collection, Dennis Thompson quotes Judith Shklar, who described the politics of anti-hypocrisy as an ‘unending game of mutual unmasking’, in which everyone is bound to lose. Because democracy is a system of government that institutionalises distrust, as the price we pay for handing over so ...”

“... aspect: the supposed portrait of Beatrice by Guido Reni, which shows a beautiful young girl with brown hair and wide, lustrous eyes. According to tradition – scrupulously nurtured by all the 19th-century writers on the subject – the portrait was taken from the life during Beatrice’s imprisonment, in late 1598 or 1599. An alternative tradition, taking ...”

“... history – not least Olwen Hufton’s The Prospect before Her (1995), Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser’s A History of Their Own (2000) and Merry Wiesner’s Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (2008) – but Hunt stakes out a hugely expanded terrain, mapping gender relations in what has come to be known as ‘big Europe’, from Ireland to the ...”

“... could be a soldier or a doctor or, heaven help us, a priest. But in the age of Jilly Cooper and Judith Krantz he had better be a polo player. Work is for pigs, and anyone without enough money to coat themselves in leisure had no place in a Krantz novel. There was something nouveau about the new bonkbusters that perfectly suited the times. A point made by ...”

“... Bardic Romance: ‘New Place, when he got there, was bright as a rubbed angel, Anne his wife and Judith his daughter yet unmarried having nought much to do save buff and sweep and pick up hairs from the floor. The mulberry tree was doing well.’ Yet, if Enderby begins as Folkestone Williams, he is closer in the final story to the sci-fi Burgess of The End ...”

“... choreography. I watched carefully when Old Fire Station people put on a show, including a solo by Judith Mackrell, in which she didn’t move, as far as I can remember, from the spot. I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one of Michael Clark’s earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, barebottomed in ...”

“... contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ...”

“... in from Ireland, and their pleasures taken among forests of borage, heifer clarts and becks where brown trout swim through watermint. But MacSweeney isn’t writing a bucolic memoir. Pearl has a cleft palate and, partly as a consequence, is illiterate. Stranded at the beginning of the alphabet, she can only vocalise ‘a-a-a-a-a-a’. The seam of her damaged ...”

“... The TV show got round such awkwardness by dint of hardly mentioning race at all, casting black and brown-skinned actors colour-blindly as the heroine’s husband and daughter, and (as in Hollywood convention) as the heroine’s brave – in some ways maybe too brave – best friend. But the situation of the fertile handmaid in Atwood’s novel – forcibly ...”

“... breeds without the Law’. From the context it is clear that Kipling was thinking not of black or brown subject peoples but of Germany (and perhaps secondarily of America). To have spotted the danger in German nationalism in 1897 might be thought prescient. Watson’s literary and Bradley’s more sociological approach to the Victorian age are ...”