“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... wet nurse and Croat housekeeper must have nourished what turned up in some of his later writing as frank Orientalism (‘Now I constantly see Dunja, beautiful, young, appearing in the oases, and the desert’). A happier influence on his work came from the French which was much spoken around him and whose poetry he discovered in the pages of the Mercure de ...”

“... was framed as an act of childish self-sabotage. Journalists kept calling them ‘defiant’; Frank Field, then MP for Birkenhead, dismissed them as ‘hotheads’. Justice Lawton, who sentenced them to prison, said the occupation was ‘about as bad a bit of behaviour as I have come across in fifty years’.The government was determined to extract an ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... allowed not to take part in the shooting, and suffered no punishment. The other helpful book is Robert Jay Lifton’s magnificent The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). Lifton interviewed a number of doctors who had worked at Auschwitz, some of them prisoners and others SS medical officers on the camp staff. No research ...”

“... was trying to bury the case, Marina Litvinenko pushed for an inquest into her husband’s murder. Robert Owen, a High Court judge, promised an ‘open and fearless’ investigation. In 2013 the foreign secretary, William Hague, made an application for ‘public interest immunity’ – which meant that the government’s classified files on Litvinenko ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... His own is staggering in scale and detail. He had the good fortune to be shown all the wonderfully frank letters and diaries of Mamaine Paget, Koestler’s second wife, by her twin sister, Celia. But he has also found his way into Comintern files, into the sullen reports on Koestler kept by MI5 (‘one third genius, one third blackguard and one third ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... could give his compliments a sharper second edge, as for example in ‘To My Honoured Friend Sir Robert Howard, on His Excellent Poems’ (Howard later became his brother-in-law). Discussing Howard’s translation of Book IV of the Aeneid, Dryden says: Elisa’s griefs are so expressed by you, They are too eloquent to have been true. ‘Elisa’, as the ...”

“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... back story, a baleful one, sheds some light here, both on the vicissitudes of the career and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers – D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind – Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among ...”

“... crucial analytic concept after her: the Female Ovation Complex, perhaps. And indeed, why not? As Robert Gottlieb’s concise yet stylish new biography reminds us, the great actress’s sumptuously chequered life would have presented even the most dimwitted Viennese shrink with a veritable orchestra pit of things to quiz her about. Consider, Herr Doktor, some ...”