“... involved in the Austrian underground after the bombing of the Karl Marx Hof: she was known as ‘Mary’. Muriel has never met Lillian Hellman, but they had a friend in common, Wolf Schwabacher. He knew Muriel’s family, and also visited her in Vienna. Schwabacher told her a lot about his friendships ‘with many actors, actresses, producers and ...”

“... errors. It is such autodidacts who tend today to monopolise the label ‘Afrocentrist’. Mary Lefkowitz’s concern, or obsession, with Afrocentrism emerged suddenly in 1991, when she wrote a review of my book Black Athena for the New Republic. As a professor of classics, she was appalled to discover that people were writing books and teaching that ...”

“... story, and everything else in A Fortunate Age, follows a template: the novel is a rewriting of Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), which charted the lives of eight members of the Vassar class of 1933 in the years after graduation. More than a decade before she wrote The Group, McCarthy published an essay in Holiday magazine called ‘The Vassar ...”

“... The WPS was a wartime force that was expected to disband at the Armistice but its commandant, Mary Allen, carried on, despite being arrested in 1921 for wearing police uniform. The CCWO connected women operating in male-dominated professions, providing practical as well as moral support, and Astor and Matheson were equally active on the home front. The ...”

“... They usually wring their hands and lament the impossibility of their task in a preface. Kenneth Wellesley, for example, in his introduction to the Penguin Histories, talks of his ‘guilt and remorse’, and fears – not unreasonably – that he may ‘prove to have butchered his victim’. But, apologies over, they get down to business, smoothing out the ...”

“... ranging from The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish text. It was translated into Dutch in 1880 and into German and Polish ...”

“... and painting her fingernails’. She referred to her liaison with Shawn simply as ‘our life’. Mary Wollstonecraft had mistresses in mind when she wrote of the ‘passions’ of men placing women ‘on thrones’. In Wollstonecraft’s view, such passions gave women a power of sorts, but they were adored rather than loved, and woman ‘is quickly scorn’d ...”

“... in biro – in other people’s books. She turned up once at the house of a friend, the novelist Mary Wesley, travelling with just two carrier bags of her things. Wesley mentioned that she had been reading Simone Weil, and the next morning found Coleman ‘sitting in bed wearing a fisherman’s jersey busily defacing Miss Weil’s Letter to a ...”

“... German and French (one book in English), and becomes a leading literary figure of the emigration. Mary appears in 1926, King, Queen, Knave in 1928, The Defence in 1929, The Eye in 1930, Glory in 1931, Laughter in the Dark in 1932, Despair in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading in 1935, most of The Gift in 1937. He doesn’t get a job in Paris or London, but he ...”

“... prose and verse. Apt to the commemorative theme is a rather gentle, musing discussion by Mary Lascelles of ‘Some Patterns in Epitaph and Elegy’. Miss Lascelles argues that epitaphs inhabited a kind of communal realm where free borrowing was possible without acknowledgment. She instances a quotation from Johnson in the epitaph for a vicar choral ...”

“... the right to approach the monarch directly on all sorts of embarrassing questions. The rapacious Wellesley and his successors arrogated the right to approve or disapprove the dynastic succession in the so-called native states and, if they did not fancy the heir, to plump another one on the throne. When the Marquis of Hastings egged on the nawab of Oudh ...”

“... meet, where a list of vanished public names (‘Where’s Brummell? Dished. Where’s Long Pole Wellesley? Diddled./Where’s Whitbread? Romilly? Where’s George the Third?’) can shift into a remembrance of names significant to the poet: ‘Where are the Lady Carolines and Franceses?’ Since incongruence is a fact of life (as well as of the poem), the ...”

“... in the world. After her American education – she went to various schools in the US and then to Wellesley – she returned to Shanghai, where she bridled at the restrictions imposed by her highly conservative mother. She ingratiated herself with a number of key players on the political scene, such as Zhang Xueliang, the ‘Young Marshal’ warlord of ...”

“... as not cajole them into bed. Some nearby colleges did not approve, but his wife, who had attended Wellesley, not only befriended but recruited some of his female attendants. Such a household required a sizeable yearly income, which was supplied, not without grumpy conditions, by his wealthy family in Atlanta, where he was born, and later by trust funds. It ...”

“... forces with his wife, who suddenly seemed rather a splendid person, to try and get him back. Mary Day-Lewis, however, knew it was hopeless and had anyway had enough. ‘I just wondered which of us was going to have Cecil if we did get him back,’ she remarked afterwards, with no more enthusiasm than if he were a lost canary. After that, Lehmann’s love ...”