“... money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent were among her many fans and beneficiaries. In August 1911, James wrote to Alice, his sister-in-law, and explained why he was at Hunter’s house. ‘I am adding day to day here, as you see – partly because it helps to tide me over a bad ...”

“... opprobrium when as the administrator of an asylum he connived in the kidnapping of a young woman, Edith Lanchester, who had been driven mad, or so her family believed, by ‘over-education’. Lanchester’s plight – disenfranchised, yet thoroughly surveilled – goes some way to explaining the enthusiasm of Murray’s 624 female volunteers. Reading Austen ...”

“... were interred on 17 September in Drumcliffe Churchyard after first lying in state at Sligo Town Hall. Picture Post added that the Yeats family had wanted a quiet ceremony but the Government had insisted on a state funeral with full honours. The Times didn’t mention that there was some doubt about who was buried in Drumcliffe, but my grandfather’s ...”

“... each other when the children were growing up. ‘Large house’ doesn’t really do justice to The Hall: when it was put up for sale 17 years later, the estate agent’s particulars (Lewis hasn’t stinted on the legwork) recorded that it was ‘set in 25 acres of parkland and boasted 17 bedrooms, three bathrooms, a billiards room, a “Tudor-style dairy”, a ...”

“... Towards the end of Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp (1924), the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She recognises them as women of the same ‘type’ as her: unattached, independent, sexually ambiguous. They dress like her, and wear their hair cut in a similar style ...”

“... do.’ Apprehensive about ‘top-hatty philanthropy’, Ashbee went to the East End, to Toynbee Hall. ‘There are some splendid men here,’ he wrote in 1886, ‘and a great deal of unostentatious heroism.’ It was here that plans for putting Ruskin into practice took shape: a school and workshop where the teachers would work in the shop and recruit the ...”

“... architect of public buildings. The painstakingly detailed plans and designs he prepared for County Hall, a massive riverside headquarters for the London County Council, engrossed him for most of 1907. It was his reverential response to Greenwich Hospital, in a style he christened Wrennaissance. He was mortified to lose, especially since one of the judges was ...”

“... They included Helene Deutsch (‘revolutionism’ was her term), Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Edith Jacobson and Karen Horney. They shared Marxist sympathies and met in Fenichel’s radical Children’s Seminar, so called not because it was devoted to child analysis but because Fenichel liked to think of the analysts as ‘naughty children’. They were ...”

“... Mimmy’s frizzy hair lifts away from her neck, how it contrasts with ‘the dark smooth locks of Edith, his wife’. A little boy covets a tin canister, illustrated with robins, on his neighbour’s mantelpiece. Yet the object of desire is always withheld or withdrawn. When a farmer’s youngest daughter gets engaged, secretly, to her lover, he catches his ...”

“... yet. It is tempting to see this polarity in terms of gender. Although the Fricker sisters Sara and Edith (married to Coleridge and Southey respectively) feature periodically in the Pantisocratic episodes of Madoc, most of the book’s trajectory seems determined by male imperatives of the era, such as conquest and subjection. In contrast, men figure only ...”

“... worked on her books at night and managed to save up for one more term’s tuition at St Hugh’s Hall, Oxford; in 1895 she sat her exams and got a First. It wasn’t an official degree, since Oxford didn’t yet allow women to graduate. (Wearing university gowns to underline this injustice was to become a central element of suffragette demonstrations.) She ...”

“... goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera. The cadences of Edith Grossman’s English version (despite a few smudges, perhaps inevitable in long and elaborately structured sentences) can lay claim to full adoptive citizenship rather than the second-class identity papers of translationese, the Nansen passport that is so ...”

“... journalist started after college in Pittsburgh. From its theatres, opera house and concert hall, she sent sharp, highly critical reviews to Nebraska papers. She formed a new attachment to Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a Pittsburgh judge in whose house she resided during the next five years while she taught English to high-school ...”

“... the company of high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over a posh dinner than sit at home and read ...”

“... English Reformation Zoologically Illustrated’ was one of the most striking exhibits at Walton Hall. ‘Titus Oates, Cranmer and Bishop Burnet were illustrated from reptiles of the lowest order,’ while ugly monkeys stood in for other Protestant worthies. Characteristically, Aldington’s book includes an appendix listing the errors of earlier biographers ...”