“... Charles I raised his droopy standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, by seizing most of the silver plate the Cambridge colleges were sending off to the king. Unlike the other leading Parliamentarians, Essex and Fairfax and Montagu, from first to last Cromwell was all for absolute victory. As a cavalry commander, he immediately cut a dash. Both at ...”

“... the tenements around as workshops, stables and an inn. Inventories paint the picture: tableware of silver and gold, Venetian glass, mother-of-pearl, tapestries portraying the journeys of Ulysses and the discovery of Newfoundland; the countess herself, tall, stately, wears ermine, tawny damask, black satin and black velvet. Looking to her last end, Margaret ...”

“... Who was the Earl of Antrim? He was the Irish Catholic, Randall McDonnell, who had married Katherine, the widow of the Duke of Buckingham and herself a Catholic convert. Until moving to Ireland late in 1638 with her new husband, the Duchess occasionally carried messages between Archbishop Laud and the Papal agent at the Court of Henrietta Maria, George ...”

“... the king again. When they next appeared in the lists, it was as a team of two, wearing identical silver beards. Until the birth​ of Prince Edward in 1537, Henry did not have a legitimate male heir, so the children of his two sisters were potential successors. Charles and la reine blanche had two daughters, a son called Henry, who died, and then another ...”

“... painted across his own features a Kathakali mask of violent emotions, the grinning red, black and silver face of a tormented demon. This, his text declared with great cries of guilt, was the real Olivier: but what readers took in primarily was the enormous theatrical energy and gusto of the breast-beating. It was as if A. A. Milne’s Tigger, for some ...”

“... them.’ When, in 1962, she received a copy of Brophy’s novel Flesh in the post, wrapped in silver paper, Murdoch wrote to her: ‘You must be the first person who has described sexual intercourse beautifully and well in a book. I liked the fine fine sensuousness of it all.’ Brophy had stuck newsprint onto the cover, making a collage: ‘Flash’, it ...”

“... published in newspapers and magazines. She had worked ‘in service’, including as a maid to Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother. Frame’s father was a railway worker of Scottish origin, who fished, did embroidery and bagpiped the children to sleep. There were five children, and Janet came in the middle, the survivor of a pair of twins. The Frames owned ...”

“... I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the ‘our beautiful old silver’ school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V. Woolf, K.A.P. [Katherine Anne Porter], Bowen, R. West etc – they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is ...”