“... aside from my husband, and I still can’t fathom how she passed the time. One is reminded of Rose Macaulay’s comment: ‘Surely a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.’) Nine Wartime Lives makes an irrefutable case for the importance of the diaries, but they form only a small slice of the MO repository and tell us almost nothing ...”

“... logic would come apart. There was a postwar marriage and baby boom, but then divorce rates rose, the birthrate fell, differentiation of work by sex came into question, and the number of married women in the labour force inched steadily higher; today, women’s labour force participation rates rival those of men. Welfare reform followed: women’s ...”

“... general population, some 7 per cent of all repatriates were sent to the Gulag, a proportion that rose to over 15 per cent for POWs. The DPs, knowing this, became even more elusive.So these refuseniks remained in Western camps. As early as 1946, Belgium recruited some into mining, but the work and conditions were so harsh that few DPs would do it. Britain did ...”

“... militant, described by Marion’s friend Mary Richardson as ‘a new order of fanatic creation’, rose phoenix-like from these scenes of violation. There is no denying the astonishing bravery of these women, but I doubt I’m the only feminist who finds this spectacle – and, still more, the WSPU’s exploitation of its shock value – repulsive. Militancy ...”

“... The question is not this simple, however. In the books by Dr Finucane, by Andrew Mackenzie and by Susan Blackmore, there are countless contemporary experiences of ‘psychic’ phenomena. They are all very carefully classified: out-of-the-body experiences, psychokinesis (the ability to move objects without physical contact or any known force), extra-sensory ...”

“... The complete sentence was: ‘No, madam! I have seen far too many myself.’ Quoting this passage, Susan Wolfson goes on to remind us that Freud comments on a neat variant of the same gag: ‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ As Dr Johnson said on the subject of the possibility of a post-mortem appearance among the ...”

“... by a man obsessed with time. Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745), the son of a London silk weaver, rose to prominence in the early decades of the 18th century as England’s leading art theorist and portraitist. Abandoning a career as a scrivener, he went on to paint writers (Pope, Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley ...”

“... between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs,’ Father and Son begins.) Susan Cheever says she once had another title for her memoir, Treetops; it was ‘Three Great Men and the Women They Destroyed’. Yet the first book she wrote about her father, Home before Dark, left her reeling at the variety of her discoveries. ‘I don’t ...”

“... and variegated bibliography. In the prologue to The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire Susan Mattern includes this astounding sentence: ‘The most modern edition of his corpus runs to 22 volumes, including about 150 titles, making up one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives.’ Galen’s productivity was such that some of his ...”

“... Each player felt reluctantly compelled To know what mystery the other held; As one white neck rose taller with desire The other three stretched likewise snakier . . . By dawn they bent and buried their flexible Extending isthmuses beneath the table It is haunted by voices and meanings not altogether human and not altogether natural: And the roots of ...”

“... were among those, seven of twelve, who had died. For the living children her feeling rarely rose even to affection. They had disliked her, she believed, from infancy. While she recorded signs of prettiness and precocity where she found them – no maternal partiality led her to imagine attractions where there were none – her diaries show that she saw ...”

“... an African American attorney general (Eric Holder), and an African American ambassador to the UN (Susan Rice, now the national security adviser). White Americans are always being reminded – rightly – that they constitute a shrinking group and that the future belongs to the African American, Latino and Asian minorities. Perhaps this was the sunset ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... read. That Pope adapted a line from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, when he wrote ‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ (Essay on Man) is constantly referred to in footnotes, but editors and critics have generally fought shy of considering the impact on Pope and other poets of his time of Finch’s work as a whole. The work of the women poets became ...”

“... but she was strong and canny. In her biography of 1981 (the only other full-length biography), Susan Chitty emphasises John’s friendships with women. Sue Roe makes less of the strong feelings John had for, and herself inspired in other women. There was an innkeeper’s wife, according to Chitty, who pursued her to Paris on her way back from ...”