“... her own: the quotations on illness range from the Greeks to Keats and Stendhal, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield and Auden. The not-so-curious fact is that when people claim to have found the essay helpful in their own and others’ time of illness, it’s not because it persuaded them to make less of the situation, but rather that it proposed links they had not ...”

“... unchallenged. Then, quite suddenly, things began to change. In 1772, the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, issued the famous Somerset Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the ...”

“... reach across the aisle when you’re hanging out with your buddies in the steam room. Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana taught Biden not to question his colleagues’ motives after Biden said that Jesse Helms, the infamous racist homophobe from North Carolina who tried to ban HIV-positive travellers from entering the US, had no heart. ...”

“... the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female employees of West End drapery ...”

“... invisible ink!), run "by the sort of men who called each other Wolly, Bunter, Biffy and Blinker. Mansfield Smith Cumming, the original ‘C.’, thought espionage ‘a capital sport’, and is memorably described by Phillip Knightley in his recently reissued study of 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote ...”

“... and how she revenged herself on any who doubted her abilities and status as a writer. Katherine Mansfield is both rival and despised friend, a member of the same set, almost alter ego. The compulsion of words united them, and Mansfield’s Journals, like Woolf’s Diary, are a way of practising that compulsion and keeping ...”

“... to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no manners,’ he wrote in ...”

“... makes it immaterial. In an enchanting piece in the People in 1950, a New Zealand journalist called Elizabeth Parsons quizzed ‘Britain’s three most eligible bachelors’ about what they might be looking for in a wife. The bachelors are Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan and Norman Hartnell. Parsons catches Novello in his dressing room applying his make-up ...”

“... Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in print. The further adventures of Isabella Thorpe, Mrs Rushworth and even the family of Mr Collins; the events of ...”

“... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...”

“... to Ireland they had to buy their big house. There was no Bowen’s Court to write a history of, as Elizabeth Bowen did. They made up for this shortcoming with an unquestioned loyalty to the empire and a cult of the stiff upper lip. The two were inextricably entwined, as Keane acknowledged in an interview when Good Behaviour came out:Mother’s father governed ...”

“... anniversary of The Second Sex in 1999, there were still no plans for a new translation: that year, Elizabeth Fallaize and I decided to draw attention to the situation again. Fallaize, whose premature death at the end of last year Beauvoir scholars mourn, analysed the effects of the vast cuts Parshley made in the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’. I wrote ...”

“... progress – in particular, on the earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. (In a famous letter written just after the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 1813, she tells Cassandra that she is ‘vain enough’ over her book, but thinks it ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling; – it wants shade.’) But what ...”

“... of Kingston in 1773. His widow was a lady better known to 18th-century gossip by her maiden name, Elizabeth Chudleigh. A generation earlier she had titillated the beau monde at a costume ball at Ranelagh Gardens: she was dressed as Iphigenia, but – if numerous popular prints are to be believed – her Ancient Greek costume consisted of little more than a ...”