“... of Mary Astell, who may have been a model for Clarissa. Astell has been called ‘England’s first feminist’ in a good book by Ruth Perry, where she is also shown to have been (like Richardson) generally conservative in religion and politics.* Like some other critics, Mrs Harris reads Richardson’s novels in the ...”

“... As lawyers’ bills mount up and they have to economise, the question is: ‘Which house to sell first?’ Other difficulties with which the common reader fails to empathise include the problem of the specially woven carpet in her writing room. In the time since she designed it – the names of all the writers she most admires are woven in ‘what looked ...”

“... Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep (1934), Roth’s first novel, became a bestseller, thirty years after it first appeared, reporters found him scraping a living in Maine, gloomily slaughtering ducks and geese with equipment he’d made out of parts scavenged from discarded ...”

“... and researcher. Her only daughter, Susie, was autistic, and in 1962 Wing co-founded the world’s first autism advocacy organisation. In 1965 she helped open the world’s first school for autistic children (John Lennon was a major donor). She wrote the first, and still definitive, guide ...”

“... entertaining authorised biography of Cash, Steve Turner establishes a suitably saintly tone on the first page. ‘It was doubtful,’ he writes of his subject, ‘whether he had a bodily organ that hadn’t been operated on, an area of skin that hadn’t been gashed, or a significant bone that hadn’t been cracked.’ This sounds like an entry from Foxe’s ...”

“... more particularly against one of his womanising friends who, not long after the march, became the first boyfriend to test out the virginal, patiently waiting Dutch cap. Doris hadn’t liked Sylvia very much; after some friends who had been rerunning the details of her life and death had gone home one evening, she told me she thought Sylvia too ...”

“... problem: Labour’s terminal collapse in Scotland, combined with the distortions of the first-past-the-post system, have created structural conditions that make it impossible for Labour to win a majority without a swing of dramatic proportions. In 2015 it needed a swing of 4.6 per cent to win a majority of one; now, in order to achieve the same ...”

“... through her cervix to set off uterine contractions, and now she has to wait. We are on the first page of Annie Ernaux’s first novel, Les Armoires vides, and we are going to have to wait with her. In pregnancy, quickening refers to the first movements of the foetus in the ...”

“... a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.In A Nation on Trial, a book written with Ruth Bettina Birn, I sought to expose the shoddiness of Goldhagen’s book. Birn, an authority on the archives Goldhagen consulted, first published her critical findings in Cambridge University’s Historical Journal. Refusing ...”

“... and later he married a girl I’d taught at another time, and I understand that I was their first shared passion.’ Imagine it: erotic unification over this man, someone who hated music in public places, fascists and Bolshevists, the feel of satin; who was dolphin-like in his movements, an obsessive self-googler before easy engines existed, who could ...”

“... nightingale is a thing of art and myth, an immortal whose song found out ‘the sad heart of Ruth’; but it is also a transient visitor to a Hampstead garden, which heedlessly slips out of earshot (‘Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about ...”

“... with the rubber tyre that was suspended from their ceiling.Hackenfeller’s Ape was Brophy’s first novel, published in 1953 when she was 23. In a preface written almost forty years later, she describes the flat she shared at the time with her friend Sally, close enough to the zoo to hear the lions roar. The novel tells the story of four days in the life ...”

“... the sense of lack of ‘ownership’ of the Human Rights Act was neither widespread nor deep. Our first public consultation confirmed this: the responses were broadly supportive of the status quo, with the caveat that most people wanted more rights for more people, not fewer rights for fewer people. Concerned that the results might be misleading, the ...”

“... for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had also first appeared long before I read it, was decisive as well, though her vivid way with physical evocation was less encouraging than Malinowski and Mead’s utopian picture of possible liberty. Beauvoir’s grim plain-speaking put bodies – gynaecology and ...”

“... anxieties, projections, phantasmagoria – things to which women are particularly prone. In the first week of 2013 I started to count, in an idling way, the number of books by women reviewed in the weekly arts pages of the Irish Times and found none. They were all by men. There was a short interview with a woman, Mary Costello, a writer whose sentences are ...”