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“... In​ 1821, aged 17, Aurore Dupin tried to kill herself by riding her horse into a deep river. Twenty-eight years later, Landry, a character in La Petite Fadette, a novel written by Dupin under her pen name George Sand, thinks about drowning himself in the river. By this time Sand’s readers would have been familiar with the suicide option ...”

“... sex’), no money, a part-time job, and an apartment in which she isn’t allowed children. Laura Kipnis ticks all the boxes (stable relationship, financially comfortable) but has just received a three-year fellowship, and her jazz-musician boyfriend is on the road half the year. It takes her ‘about ten seconds’ to make the decision. Pam Houston ...”

“... book) gathers together a coven of Gossips, Old Wives, Sybils, Mother Goose, Saint Anne, Little Red Riding Hood’s Granny and the Queen of Sheba. Inside the frame, ‘The Tales’ (the second half) casts a feminist gaze over Cinderella (aka Donkeyskin), Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard’s wives, the Beast’s Beauty, the Little Mermaid and the Blonde. On every ...”

“... books in which much worse things happen than the semi-accidental death of an insect. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books feature a pig being butchered and wild talk of Indian massacres, but no one calls The Little House in the Big Woods ‘repellent’. The difference is that Wilder writes in a purely realist register. Collodi is more heartless, using ...”

“... least successful moments, walks straight into two of the tales. Above all, he is not just read, as Laura Brown read Woolf in The Hours, making but not quite making Woolf’s tragic story her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at all. He ...”

“... fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A children’s book which has somehow got out of hand . . . A poverty of invention which is almost pathetic,’ Edmund Wilson ...”

“... of foresight to him stretches common sense, especially since CCTV footage shows him in the park riding his bike at the time of the stabbing. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years. Francis FitzGibbon, who defended Conteh, characterises the law on joint enterprise as a fishing expedition: ‘Drop your drift net into the ocean and ...”

“... near the House of Commons that March? Of the 75 women arrested, a good quarter were from the West Riding. Lizzie got 14 days in Holloway. What did imprisonment do to their lives? And what of the stalwarts of the NUWSS, like Agnes Sunley, the wife of a packer in an asbestos factory, who’d canvassed for the vote in working-class districts of Leeds since the ...”

“... her ride him about like a horse, which he did. Medieval artists took to this with gusto. Phyllis riding Aristotle was cast in brass and sculpted in stone and ivory, depicted on carpets, tapestries and stained-glass windows, and in multiple woodcuts and engravings. My favourite is Hans Baldung’s from 1515. A smirking, corpulent Phyllis sits ...”

“... Lynne did something similar when she got pregnant at 16 in San Diego in 1967: made my stepsister Laura (who was ten at the time) jump off a sofa onto her stomach to make it ‘pop’. The gambit failed to produce the desired effect. Lynne had the baby in a Catholic place for unwed mothers and left it with an adoption agency. She later married Bill, a ...”