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“... that she was herself French, but we know of two earlier maids in the Mountjoy household – Margaret Brown and Joan Langford – and both were English. Could Mountjoy’s servant and concubine in 1613 be Frances Williams? This is speculation, of course, though it would explain why Mountjoy ends up being charged along with the three Frenchmen. As the ...”

“... LeRoy’s 1949 remake, with June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a ...”

“... if the car industry fails the Labour government will go with it (not that it won’t go anyway). Margaret Thatcher thrived on the effects of recession by positing them as the sad but unavoidable consequence of economic resolve and modernisation. Labour can’t use that vocabulary so easily. The names Dagenham and Longbridge have a haunting effect on the ...”

“... circles is the prospect of a two-speed Europe, in which Britain would be consigned to the slow lane. John Major and Douglas Hurd believe Britain will be in control of the 1996 agenda, and dismiss the possibility that others any longer wish to move faster towards integration than they do. Therefore, they contend, the old model of fast and slow tracks is out ...”

“... grey in the dark doings of romantic opera. The longest and most significant item is an essay by Margaret Anne Doody connecting Gulliver’s Travels and Virgil’s Georgics. This covers a variety of animal and vegetable themes; the links which it proposes range from the bones and skulls dug up in Brobdignag (from the end of the first Georgic) to Houyhnhnm ...”

“... dine on macaroni and cheese at the Porridge Bowl in Soho or the Orange Grove in St Martin’s Lane. After plays and concerts, he was happy with eggs and cocoa at home. The tiny, painstaking reckonings at the end of each day grind on one’s nerves as they must have on his. You can feel his exhilaration when, with his share of the insurance paid at his ...”

“... on Fleet Street, hurrying towards the Evening Standard offices, then around the corner in Shoe Lane. I tagged along as he explained, between puffs, that there had been an unfortunate misprint in a piece he had written about Orson Welles. Luckily, he had spotted this in the first edition and now was on his way to ensure it was corrected for the rest of the ...”

“... common, apart from the ministrations of Boaden. They have a Hereford background. As the heroine of Margaret Drabble’s Garrick Year remarks, ‘it seemed that [Garrick] had been born in Hereford, as had Kemble, Mrs Siddons and Nell Gwynne, though of the four Garrick seemed to me to be the most interesting character.’ In fact, most authorities assign the ...”

“... with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be seducers have moved into his domestic museum: Plotwell, disguised as an Egyptian mummy, and Underplot, as an ...”

“... rite of passage. Beer Street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day (not so Drug Lane). AA rests on mysterious foundations. Given the inviolable ‘tradition’ of anonymity (‘the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities’) no one actually knows how therapeutically effective its ...”

“... account of Elizabeth’s tour of north Holland in 1625, written by a member of her retinue, Margaret Croft. Although Everett Green had cited Croft’s account in her biography of Elizabeth, when Jardine eventually found it (with Akkerman’s help), she believed it had been deliberately misfiled. Replete with multilingual puns, Croft’s account ...”

“... work of women imaginative writers.’ So into the witness-box come successively Edna O’Brien, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. In the case of three, perhaps four, of the witnesses nothing is said about how they give their evidence. In the two years that Rebecca West was contributing to the Clarion, 1912 and 1913, she ...”

“... designers were brought in to do the costumes. These were Elizabeth Montgomery and her two partners Margaret and Sophia Harris, the Motleys, who specialised in producing stunning effects with the cheapest materials. The OUDS Romeo and Juliet entranced all who saw it and was the trial run for the triumphant version Gielgud directed at the New Theatre in ...”

“... on in the faith that a reward was … in heaven’.The religious sensibility that led Hopkins, Margaret Heaney and the teenaged Seamus Heaney to Catholic piety emerged in the adult poet as attachment to land, to numinous sites: an attachment analogous to, but never identical with, religious faith. Critics distinguish genres of poems about rural places ...”

“... words for Blairites who have recently rediscovered some of their radicalism: Angela Eagle and Margaret Hodge, for example, now comfortably far enough from power safely to denounce the tax-dodgers and newspaper barons they would have bowed before five years ago. Jones attempts to understand why the Labour Party became so drastically conformist in its ...”