“... forgave her for a clearly recognisable account of them as a foolishly doting husband with a lower-class wife. Wilde didn’t speak to her again for ten years after finding himself described as fat-cheeked and elephantine, ‘scattering epigrams of not remarkably brilliant wit’. Despite the chilly reception given to Miss Brown, Lee went on putting friends ...”

“... and accounted for her naturally nurturing role, while making her a stranger to such activities as war or science. In the 1930s the active principles found in testes and ovaries – hormones – were isolated and their chemical structures determined. The endocrinologists saw them as specifically ‘sex hormones’, and named them testosterone and ...”

“... about ordinary daily experience and reads the messages they encode about religious particularism, class expectations and gender propriety. The implications of what she finds can be broadly applied, but the focus of her evidence is more narrow than the subtitle suggests: she draws principally on Nuremberg, Leipzig, Augsburg and other significant towns, like ...”

“... dictatorship and the fight for the spoils of oil. But for all the talk of a booming middle class, and a surge in consumer goods and banking, Africa’s largest economy is still overwhelmingly dependent on income from oil and gas: it accounts for more than two-thirds of treasury revenue and 95 per cent of export earnings. The shale oil revolution in the ...”

“... feel misunderstood, underappreciated, condescended to and confined to jobs they don’t like. The class consciousness that Werther experiences is hardly a thing of the past, even in post-Thatcher Britain, with its avowed commitment to merit alone, or at least to money alone. The trials and tribulations of sensitive young people are seen in numerous books and ...”

“... but this is unlikely: the family kept a house in Kensington, and like many young women of her class in Ireland, she was already well used to life in London when in 1898 she enrolled at the Slade to study painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard ...”

“... enough – to lay out a considerable sum in her memory. Many slaves, especially male prisoners of war, were worked to death in mines and quarries, but slavery wasn’t racialised and inescapable as it is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Husbands commemorated slave-wives, and freed slaves did the same for their former masters. Everyone I’ve mentioned so far was a ...”

“... sort of performance, Rapaport contends, played out symbolically the aspirations of the immigrant class and the rural poor (for his Milk Can Escape Houdini was chained inside a giant churn). She compares Houdini to Henry Brown, the slave who in 1849 had himself shipped in a postal crate from his Virginia plantation to freedom in Philadelphia. Brown, too, was ...”

“... ten best novels in the world’. Maugham’s choices were neither surprising nor controversial (War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Moby-Dick) but in a note that accompanied his list, he suggested that ‘the wise reader’ will ‘get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the ...”

“... were a political gesture intended to show how serious Jack Straw was going to be about the war on drugs. The campaign was very active. I remember being confronted on the escalator at Holborn with a fly poster emblazoned with John Brock’s face – a face I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. The campaigners organised charity concerts, a sleep-out in ...”

“... boots, and their irresponsible behaviour was badly received. Fleming takes up the story: ‘The class-ridden British sneered at each other. The Europeans took a more egalitarian view: all Britons were equally awful. It wasn’t so much their clothes and their accents as their manners … [They] were known as “Yes and No Tourists”, from their refusal to ...”

“... Jews who tried to protect their daughter by putting her in a Catholic boarding school for working-class children, a place called the Holy Heart of Mary; as he meets a cousin of Dora’s and is given some family photographs; and finally as he registers Dora’s disappearance from her school in December 1941, and wonders what she can have done until she shows ...”

“... think defence of either was necessarily a good thing or even possible, and the threat of nuclear war confirmed her dry sense of doom. In The Birds, an undermining of yet another ancestral work, An Englishman’s Home (1909) by Guy du Maurier, Daphne rewrote her uncle’s patriotic script, gutting it of the heroics in the face of an alien, inhuman invasion ...”

“... guns, and for the first time had a chance to engage the enemy, if only at five miles up. By the war’s end the force, which at its peak had numbered 1,793,000, had won two George Crosses and 13 George Medals. A total of 1206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds. Piquant items from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been ...”

“... White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more sophisticated mode of expression. ‘I’m so bored I wish I’d been birth-controlled so as not to ...”