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“... Two months after Tennyson’s death Burne-Jones was reluctantly following the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence ...”

“... contemporary female practitioners: the psychoanalytically inflected images of young girls by Sarah Jones; Justine Kurland’s wayward ‘Girl Pictures’; Deana Lawson’s richly detailed portraits.At the Hepworth, some of the photographs are accompanied by a short text describing their genesis, making explicit what is hinted at in their depiction of aspects ...”

“... we may draw as many inferences about aristocracy as we can or wish to. The women are Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, the grandson of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. The main story starts with the birth of Caroline in 1723 and ends with the death of Sarah in 1826. About these four sisters ...”

“... there they were: ‘wherever one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’ Like Emily Brönte, Charlotte Mew and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song’, or others that children readily understand ...”

“... Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, it was considered a marvel, and why Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, charming though it was, failed because it was self-indulgent. Self-indulgence was very often the reason for a film or play to fail in the eyes of Doris and her friends. It seemed to be a trap waiting for every maker of every art, and I couldn’t ...”

“... It takes​ Emily Brontë the best part of three chapters to get to the moment everyone remembers, whether they’ve read Wuthering Heights or not: a man in bed, a dream, the insistent tap-tap of a branch at the window, a broken pane, the man’s fingers closing on an ‘ice-cold hand’, a woman wailing ‘Let me in – let me in!’ Hollywood, however, was in a hurry ...”

“... over the pros and cons of women’s admission to lectures and examinations that had gone on since Emily Davies set up the embryo Girton College (at Hitchin) in 1869; there were overwhelming physiological reasons for keeping women firmly out of universities. The response to Grant Allen’s outburst was a surprising and little known episode in the history of ...”

“... tidiness as against messiness. Her hero, Arthur, is as neat and tidy as the talented Mr Ripley. Emily Prager, a New York fantasist, seems less keen on social conventions. A Visit from the Footbinder, the first story in her collection, is about Pleasure Mouse, a small girl in ancient China, having her feet squashed into ladylike deformity. Older women are ...”

“... as straightforwardly readable – and haunting – as the stories of Walter De La Mare, say, or as Emily Brontë. Secondly, it is a reflection on the largest public event in Broch’s life – the takeover of Germany and Austria by the Nazis, heralding their attempt to conquer the world, using ‘crowd-psychology’. Thirdly, it is uncompleted, though it may ...”

“... an old plot device. Pamela complains about the important letter to her mother that is stolen; Tom Jones has to leave home because the letter that contains the secret of his birth is misdirected; Tess writes a letter of confession to Angel Clare, but it slips beneath the carpet and is never delivered. Letters have been an uncertain way to communicate in ...”

“... is just one more idiocy away from an uncontrollable guffaw. The interrogators are not all men – Emily Maitlis and Kirsty Wark on Newsnight, and Sarah Montague and Mishal Husain on Today – but the men set the tone. Looming behind them all is the ghostly presence of Jeremy Paxman and what he said was the unspoken question in any political interview: why is ...”

“... Massachusetts); others are less often commented on: ‘Cuscuscaraway’, ‘Usk’, ‘Bustopher Jones’. Though it may be possible to think of books by other poets which feature more poems named after people or places (Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is one), I doubt if there’s another major poet who had such a sustained talent for names and ...”

“... of a legal clerk and his wife. She went to Manchester Art School in 1871, as did her sisters Emily and Julia, where they were all prize-winning students, though frustrated by the scope of the tuition available to women and the restrictions imposed on the rewards. Life classes weren’t then available to women, and women weren’t allowed to exhibit at ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... boast equal longevity. Shortly after becoming rector of Lincoln College in 1861, Pattison married Emily Francis Strong, 27 years his junior. In her late teenage years, Strong ‘used to horrify her ordinary church friends . . . by her habit of doing penance for the smallest fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the bare floor or on the ...”