“... that pervades the Palace.From the Firm’s most entitled familiars down to its ‘high-born’ nabobs and sycophants in waiting, all the way down indeed to its ill-paid secretaries and resentful menials: everyone seems willing to ‘reveal’ the family secrets to Brown. Bullying, cruel sackings, evictions from grace and favour houses, cousins ...”

“... a coarse and cruel tyrant, but the deliverer of his people and the founder of the modern state. Anne Boleyn wasn’t the innocent victim of a monster’s caprice, but a nymphomaniac and serial adulteress who was properly tried and legally executed. Thomas More, the genial philosopher, was not a saint but a sadistic bigot. The real Mary Tudor wasn’t the ...”

“... of architectural and social history. Let one epiphany sum up his attitude to the former: I was born in the heavily bombed port of Southampton in the early 1980s and the city’s postwar modernist buildings would have been finished at least a decade earlier. I can recall looking at its mainly 1960s skyline from the walkway of a bricky pomo Asda, thinking ...”

“... without the idea of his childhood landscape as release. Out of that pulsation, Ford argues, was born ‘the concept of Wessex’: the rural scene, eternal but eternally threatened by overweening urbanism, the pastoral redoubt far from the madding crowd, where Hardy could ‘know some liberty’, as he puts it in his poem ‘Wessex Heights’. Ford reminds ...”

“... century, Horace Walpole pored over a miniature by Isaac Oliver – Hilliard’s brilliant French-born pupil – and found that ‘the largest magnifying glass only calls out new beauties.’The​ 400th anniversary of Hilliard’s death this year has been marked by the publication of Elizabeth Goldring’s impeccably researched new biography, and by an ...”

“... confession, a label often used to describe the work of Plath and her contemporary Anne Sexton) lead us, not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past? Do we enter the room, see the knife slit the finger, catch the raised voices, watch the vase shatter, hear the baby ...”

“... After one minute, Rupert became aware, however, that the body of one of his fellow actors, Anne Lambton, was shaking like a spin-dryer next to me . . . Soon I was shaking, too . . . Tears were streaming down our faces but we were just about under control when a lady in the audience said: ‘Ahh, those two must have been really fond of him.’ That ...”

“... Gothic scenario of scandals and disasters out of their family history. Fanny’s eldest sister was born before her parents’ marriage; her younger brother Charles was sent down from Cambridge for stealing library books; her stepmother was violent and tyrannical; her half-brother Richard was shipped off to India for some unnamed crime; her brother-in-law ...”

“... most distinguished military writers, Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, have declared: ‘Born of the ambition of one wilful, reckless man, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was anchored in delusion, propelled by deceit, and bound to end in calamity.’ The deceit is sustained throughout this book by manipulation of figures and misrepresentation of ...”

“... relic of times past, and in 1947 he contracted his last and apparently happiest marriage – to Anne Sullivan, a young, beautiful, spirited Irish Canadian almost as rich as he. Ridley’s protective attitude toward his subject is so undisguised as to be endearing. He paints him as a model of the aristocratic ideal, and explains away or skims over the rough ...”

“... to ours except that Queen Elizabeth has borne five children, the extra one being the second-born Prince Richard, Duke of Sussex. Now that he has grown up, who of his three differently-unsuitable ladies will Richard marry? The aristocrat with the mad mother, the American who takes drugs or the black one? Unlike the Prince of Wales, Richard is not ...”

“... divinity of Lenin himself is being questioned, there is more than a whiff of the death of Queen Anne about Rybakov’s revelation that Stalin was a bloodthirsty and paranoiac tyrant. And though the portrayal of Stalin and his entourage is detailed and convincing, it lacks the sinister power of Solzhenitsyn’s version. Indeed, in form – though not of ...”

“... word failure fled into my      dictionary one page after facetious, I thought of you. Though Anne Sexton is more often invoked, The Book of Demons touches on the kinds of personal misery and breakdown that are also to be found in Sylvia Plath. The paranoid fantasies of the addict in forced recovery transform the hospital staff into ...”

“... class, social behaviour and sexual morality matter in 1939, in ways incomprehensible to those born into a freer society; the murder and the motive, the narrator emphasises, were ‘of their time, rooted in their time’, and impossible to imagine in a different period. What do we have? Faith Longley, thirty-odd years on, recreating her wartime sojourns ...”

“... says the author. He is not a man to let a symbol give him the slip. The unblushing bride was born in 1958. Her mother, also called Madonna, was a French-Canadian X-ray technician; her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was an engineer. The family was large but affluent, and Madonna grew up in pleasant suburbs: the blue-collar upbringing she claims ...”