“... India, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere’. As a young woman she worked to relieve the potato famine of 1898, and later spent most of her fairly ample fortune in attempts to alleviate the routine cruelties of British rule. Francis Stuart, who at 17 married Maud’s daughter Iseult and was himself a fair hater ...”

“... deep shade, demoted to the background of the picture, their way barred by the crowded diggings. A young lady distributes tracts. A crazed herb-seller moves anxiously forward. Carlyle himself is there, on the sidelines, looking curiously furtive. Central to the picture is its heroine, her poised gesture reflecting that of the valiant workman who stands behind ...”

“... too long unmarried daughter, the whale washed up on the Norfolk coast, the family scandal when the young Margery Paston fell in love with the bailiff and married him. It’s enthralling material, and good for a few historical novels along the way; but it’s not, as Castor demonstrates, what the story of the Pastons is actually about. The many collections or ...”

“... Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the limits of reason (Edward de Bono, The Five-Day Course in Thinking). The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do drive in Western culture is indeed ancient, and has surprisingly widespread roots. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is Melissa Bank’s first book. It comes to Britain from ...”

“... to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. A fondness for playing roles ran in the family. His father, John Ross, tall, good-looking and a bit of a dandy, spent twenty years failing to complete a Life of ...”

“... men who struggled most with life in the dolls’ house. Ridley’s biography of George’s father, Edward VII, showed how as prince of Wales he sank into an analgesic round of gargantuan meals, card playing, shooting and ponderous intercourse with society ladies. Unwilling to become the signing automaton of constitutional theory after his accession, ...”

“... In a short story called ‘The Value of Money’ (1964), we are told that the childhood of Edward Gellert ‘was separated sharply from his adolescence by his mother’s death, which occurred when he was ten.’ In Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf (1945), the teenager Lymie Peters has already lost his mother. The narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow ...”

“... drinking, and periodically subject to extreme physical abuse, the Marlowe of the novels, unlike Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity, is trapped in the dark underside of American life and never acquires the insurance man’s protective armour, his forceful, single-minded menace. But whereas in Woman in the Window Lang directed ...”

“... manners. In Aleph’s duetting with Harvey we are to hear a song of foolish innocence, sung by two young people about to trip over the threshold of life, not an idiom resonant with social and educational privilege. The ‘king-size sheet from Liberty’s sale’ which serves as the best table-cloth at Clifton is just a prop on a stage set. Far from wishing to ...”

“... bears little resemblance to the archetypal Irish revolutionary as sketched by Tom Garvin: a young man from the country, aspiring and impatient, frustrated of opportunities, working at a level below that befitting his education. His Mayo background, as the son of a solicitor’s clerk in Castlebar, remained hugely important to him, however, and when the ...”

“... suggest that ‘the family might be in some such moment of vital agitation as that attending the Young Girl’s engagement, or pending engagement’, his imagination seems to have been chiefly engaged by the idea of rounding up a dozen leading writers, each of whom would treat a common subject ‘in character’. ‘There could be fun enough,’ he had ...”

“... they looked like. She made things in plasticine – heads, flowers – and drew and painted from a young age. When she was 16 she enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied illustration and textile design and took life drawing classes with Bernard Meninsky, who was known for his heavy black charcoal lines (Cooke preferred a 3H ...”

“... me as deeper, more naive things, in their worked-up despondency, than almost all the spellbound young men and dream-wrapped young ladies, trying, sculpturally or pictorially, for much the same wine-and-roses effect. The poems, in a word, were more beautiful. (And this immediate judgment of taste on my part linked up, as I ...”

“... US, travelled to Vienna and returned as Dr Freud’s Wunderkind. Amazing social success for one so young. Strong influence on such older associates as Education, Government, Child-Rearing and the Arts, and a few raffish friends like Advertising and Criminology.   Complaint: Speaks of overwork, loss of confidence and inability to get provable results. Hears ...”

“... of Moldavia, its capital, Iaşi, belonged to an Orient that would be familiar to readers of Edward Said. A ‘degraded’ populace was mesmerised by ‘the constant expectation of the arrival of some fatal order’: the gorgeous costumes of the women rendered ‘their indolent languor peculiarly voluptuous’; doubly supine, the ladies at court were ...”