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“... This is why, after the end of the marriage comedy, which became so remarkable a vehicle in Jane Austen’s hands, the stories and destinies of women come to offer the richest raw material for literature: they are stories of failure, epitomised in the novel of adultery. It is women’s compensation for their exclusion from the Bildungsroman as such, and ...”

“... one of whom was married to Thomas Wharton, son of Philip, Baron Wharton, the Nonconformists’ champion in the House of Lords and John Owen’s patron. Her son, the poet Rochester, was a supporter of Buckingham, was listed by Shaftesbury as ‘worthy’, and despite repeated bouts of severe illness served on the committee that examined the case for ...”

“... In Brontë’s work the boundaries of the term are explored; the ‘hypochondria’ from which Jane Eyre suffers on the eve of her wedding is a crawling (and well-founded) apprehension that disaster is around the corner. Our bodies make us know things our mind doesn’t quite know, or won’t accept: ambiguities in our situation, undeclared and forbidden ...”

“... to him instead. At about 13, he steadied. He started to work at school, and became a junior judo champion: a sport he still practises, and which has become part of his lithe, fit public image. And, around this time, he began to read Soviet spy thrillers and was swept off his feet by the film Sword and Shield – a heroic movie about the KGB. Apart from the ...”

“... into arithmetic. Racism did not need genealogy. The marriage of the world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson – unquestionably Black – to two white women in succession prompted a Georgia congressman in 1912 to argue for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages. There were race riots all over the country when Johnson defeated James ...”

“... in this distressed nation’. Sabato has since become known, in the blurb’s words, as ‘a champion of social justice’. His first novel, however, in spite of his political engagement, is not a polemic concerned with national politics, but what Le Soir rightly if ripely called ‘a beautiful poem of madness and death’. It is indeed a striking and ...”

“... longer tear his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can one who strove with all his might to champion liberty.’ Swift’s claim to his rest from ‘savage indignation’ was also, characteristically, a literary allusion. In his First Satire, Juvenal splenetically explains why he finds himself writing satire at all. He stands in the streets of Rome, he ...”

“... Not everyone​  has a chimpanzee named after them. When the primate ethologist Jane Goodall called one of the troop she studied in Tanzania ‘Huxley’, it was an affectionate tribute to her colleague Julian Huxley, distinguished biologist and prominent popular science writer. But observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas Henry Huxley, the best-known ‘man of science’ in Victorian England, a comparative anatomist who also became the leading, and most aggressive, public spokesman for evolutionary ideas, to the point where he was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog ...”

“... about her subject, the more she can tell – the worse the story sounds. Janet Todd has been a champion of Wollstonecraft for the length of her scholarly career. Unsurprisingly, she has taken exception to works that treat her with less respect than Todd believes her to have deserved. When Claire Tomalin’s biography appeared (one of several) during an ...”

“... most provoking; and even admirers noticed a curious fixedness about her expression: the young Jane Porter, much impressed, reported that ‘she wears a constant smile’. Burney saw ‘an almost set smile, which had an air of determined complacence, & prepared acquiescence’. You can’t move in the poems for smiles, as McCarthy notes – ‘smiles ...”

“... the rural poor. During his time in Antrim he met and courted an Anglican clergyman’s daughter, Jane Waring, who turned him down when he made the one formal proposal of his life. When the opportunity arose to return to Moor Park in the spring of 1696, he left Kilroot as soon as he could and didn’t take up another church post until after Temple’s death ...”

“... a dozen other offices and organisations. Chief of liaison for the CI Staff in the early 1960s was Jane Roman, then in her late forties and, like her boss, a veteran of the OSS. Roman’s job included the signing of routing slips, which brought her to the attention of Morley, who was then a reporter working for the ‘Outlook’ section of the Washington ...”

“... aristos, dopers with great collections of blues records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The ...”

“... women in literature? The best one could hope for in a husband, as Hardwick put it in her essay on Jane Carlyle, was sensitivity: ‘This is the unspoken contract of a wife … In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin – consideration for their feelings.’Again and again, Hardwick’s essays return to the subject of marriage. Some of the ...”

“... hunger, the plague, the scaffold, the clergy, but also minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen – poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples, Mr Collins’s ‘Collins’, the comedy of the infinitely small. It cannot have been simply a class limitation, or a limitation of experience, that intimidated his pen. It was a resolve, very American, to ...”