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“... from 1660 – this is omitting foreign authors, pseudonymous characters like ‘Captain Alexander Smith’, and others whose masculinity may be nominal. It would be rash to expect all these to qualify for Spender’s epithet ‘good’. But if Ann Emelinda Skinn and M. Peddle (two of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is not ...”

“... account of Burney’s five hellish years at Court, as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. They join several other biographies on the library shelf. It is worth asking – as Harman and Chisholm, for all their virtues, do not – what Burney was doing composing, storing (and later editing) these supposedly confidential documents. They have ...”

“... waiting for the unconventional Tennants to kiss it awake. The kiss was administered by the girls: Charlotte, who married Lord Ribblesdale; Lucy, who married Thomas Graham-Smith; Laura, who married Alfred Lyttelton; and Margot, who considerably later married Asquith and had the highest profile of them all. The male Tennants ...”

“... wide-ranging, little considered. The wits. I would put her alongside Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, Charlotte Mew and Penelope Fitzgerald. All unflinching, elliptical, self-disguising. King quotes well from a terrific essay in which Bainbridge describes the surprise she got when she attended her brother’s ...”

“... rotten. Just as well. A hundred and fifty-five years earlier, Grangemouth Dockyard had built the Charlotte Dundas, the world’s first practicable steamship, intended for towing barges on the adjoining Forth and Clyde Canal. This she did, successfully, but the wash from the paddlewheel carried the banks away and she was laid up. In 1861, some clown spotted ...”

“... six years ago, among a chorus of praise for the new, revised Oxford English Dictionary, OED2, Charlotte Brewer entered a dissenting opinion (3 August 1989): The riches stored in the two previous dictionaries are now much more accessible, and reviewers have already reported how delightful it is to browse through one of the 20 handsome volumes of OED2, and ...”

“... with which they could be turned into reality. His bid to publish a book was firmly turned down by Smith and Elder. He seems to have wanted security and affection rather than a life of foreign peril, but with little money there could be few prospects of marriage. England seemed to have nothing to offer him. Like his mother, but in very different ...”

“... was fading so fast from living memory that they might otherwise be lost for ever, or because, like Charlotte Mew, their achievement, though slight, was not negligible. ‘She did write at least one good poem, how many of us can say that?’ Fitzgerald wrote to Richard Ollard at Collins, who was pessimistic about the prospects for a biography. At odds with the ...”

“... against the shadow-plots derived from earlier fiction: as practised readers, we recognise Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway as the centres of intensity in the book’s life, the ‘major characters’, and are led to expect connection between them at the level of event. Instead, their contacts are oblique and communal: like other inhabitants of the ...”

“... one of Garibaldi’s generals called them. Duggan, who learned how to debunk myth from Denis Mack Smith, did not waste his time with the maestro. He has a similar eye for the absurd and the same finely honed prose style. Yet behind the fun he has a serious purpose. The myth-making allowed the new rulers of Sicily to pretend that the deep injustices of rural ...”

“... Festival Overture that seems to enunciate ‘Oh, Mrs Aphra Behn’ (or ‘Oh, Logan Pearsall Smith’ when you are in a different literary mood). Maureen Duffy traced Aphra-Eaffry Johnson’s parents, Elizabeth and Bartholomew (as the register spells him) Johnson, and much of their ancestry, and set out all the information, with proper scholarly caution ...”

“... a ready-made cartoon: it needed no comment, only somebody to point, and found its man in William Smith, MP for Norwich and an early friend of the Lake poets. Smith pulled from one pocket a copy of the Quarterly, and from the other a copy of Wat Tyler, and asked if the inference was not that the author of the one must ...”

“... of the Enlightenment, acquainted with many of its Scottish stars (David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith) and yet constantly muddled about what they should think and how they should act, about how to respond to newfangled notions of human rights, about where the shifting frontier between universal law and private greed might run. Thomas Gainsborough’s ...”

“... she cuts out a dimension of her story. A fuller account would begin with the neoclassicism of Charlotte Lennox, the novelist and Shakespeare critic who in 1759 translated Pierre Brumoy’s book of versions and commentaries, The Greek Theatre. Or even with Nicholas Udall, who wrote in 1548 of ‘young virgins so nouzled and trained in the studie of ...”

“... is said to be good – but goodness, Dame Ivy is hard work. 29 July. A piece in the Independent by Charlotte Philby, Kim Philby’s granddaughter, prompted by the publication of Anthony Blunt’s apologia released by the British Library. Not surprisingly she draws an unfavourable comparison between Blunt and Philby, bolstered by happy family pictures of her ...”