“... written in 1937-38, by which time Whitaker and her husband were living comfortably at Bolton Old Hall. After struggling with infertility (though Whitaker speaks of her ‘barrenness’ as a comedy rather than a tragedy) the couple adopted two children: Michael, pseudonymised as ‘Nick’ in the book, and Valerie, who appears as ‘baby’ or ...”

“... Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a ...”

“... for the European and American markets; and three single-volume reprints, published by Chapman and Hall, and allegedly ‘carefully revised’ by Dickens. In her copious and lucid introduction to the Clarendon edition (which had not appeared when Gaskell set out the problems) Nina Burgis gives the evolution of David Copperfield from Dickens’s first recorded ...”

“... and there is no democratic representation in the running of the school, hospital or town hall. A doctor living in the town explains: I’d rather live in a civil than a political society. Here we have a contract with TCC that defines our property rights, and we are not frustrated by bureaucrats with their own agenda. I don’t have a contract with ...”

“... part in her various movies. It is not that Kidman is his favourite sweetheart: he prefers ‘Catherine Deneuve, Julia Roberts, Grace Kelly and Donna Reed’, stars he fears to write about because he cares too much; but he will freely expose his passion for Kidman’s ‘elegant Australian bod’. This was a high-risk strategy, and Thomson can’t say he ...”

“... to cook it. You can go to the Fortress of Charry, in the Quercy (which used to be the residence of Catherine de Medici’s capitaine des gardes) for a very reasonable price. Has not Mayle been taken in by his local trader? He tells us too that the wine to drink with foie gras is Chateau d’Yquem, which costs at least £60 a bottle. Hence he is looking for ...”

“... it as part of the Ottoman Empire from the 15th century until it was annexed to Russia in 1783 by Catherine the Great. On 18 May 1944, more than a hundred and eighty thousand Tatars – mostly women, children and the elderly, because the younger men were at the front – were rounded up and deported to the Central Asian republics, mainly to ...”

“... she sides firmly with Hastings. She refuses to see the occasion, which took place in Westminster Hall, as anything more than a spectacle (the tickets, the opera glasses, the fashion statements), and reports the histrionics of Hastings’s prosecutors with disdain. (Sheridan gave a five-hour speech before collapsing in tears of exhaustion into the arms of ...”

“... Abbey – mocking a more old-fashioned novel – does allow Mrs Morland a parting conference with Catherine in her closet – the exception rather proves Tristram’s point. Dickens requires a different use of the imagination. He describes scenes which must be brought to the mind’s eye, and it is for this reason that his novels can be illustrated so ...”

“... it with fascination, it might be one verse of Bradshaw, one verse of hymn book, one verse of music hall joke. Whereas the other thing – ‘polystrophic rhymed gush to loved ones’ is Benn’s description – not even the layman thinks that’s poetry. Poetry, Anna Akhmatova said, ‘is made from all sorts of rubbish’. ‘There is nothing that is not ...”

“... came crossly down to find that she was right, only in those days the birds were peacocks from the Hall. Today the pheasants don’t hang about, two of them skidding down the sloping roof of the hut like ski jumpers and launching themselves into space before stepping fastidiously round the garden expecting to be fed. 16 July. A book review in the LRB by ...”

“... course she was brought from the family home in County Durham to be launched in London. From Seaham Hall, a solid neoclassical house which she always loved, with its views across the terraced gardens to the sea, Annabella was catapulted into Regency London, and a milieu of high taste and low morals. She enjoyed herself thoroughly at dances and parties, aware ...”

“... up his quarrels with the dean and chapter at York, he seemed perpetually compelled to quit Shandy Hall. Sometimes it is health trips of increasingly unhopeful prognosis; sometimes it is the assemblies at Harrogate, the races at York, the small-town amenities of Scarborough. Of course there are the greater fleshpots of London and Paris: at the start of this ...”

“... were warped in their image.‘Every Saturday night we had ballroom dancing in the great marble hall,’ said Caroline, ‘and the headmistress sat drumming her fingers, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a glass of crème de menthe. We had to dance with her father, who’d been wounded as a sapper in the First World War: either he had his ...”

“... in Katharine’) and condescending, visiting Fullerton’s parents like ‘a more affable Lady Catherine de Burgh’ [sic]. Witnesses are summoned who remember her as ‘abnormally rigid and abnormally fussy’. She displays throughout ‘a powerful ego’: ‘Deeper than self-doubt was certainty of the importance of her self.’ But Wharton’s egotism ...”