“... by croup. In 1874 John Yeats took his family away from the Pollexfens to London. A sixth child, Jane, was born the following year, on Jack’s fourth birthday, but died within months. Five years later, when money was very short, Jack was sent to Sligo, to be brought up by his grandparents. When Susan Yeats died on 3 January 1900, her daughters were in their ...”

“... Ramsey’s, one shared with Keynes. In philosophy: Ramsey sentences, the Ramsey test, the Ramsey-Lewis theory of reference, and the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of natural laws. Many of his ideas were so groundbreaking that they were taken up in earnest only decades later. This phenomenon has also been named after him: the ...”

“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the vault of an ...”

“... English literature, radical reactionaries to a man (Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis) though not, as it happens, to a Bloomsbury woman. The advent of William Morris was the point where this ambiguous lineage finally joined the modern world. Morris was of course quite as much a neo-medievalist as Carlyle or Ruskin; but his achievement was to ...”

“... book, incidentally, appeared only six years ago; and ‘thick and fast they come at last,’ like Lewis Carroll’s oysters.) Robert Alter has not followed her example, but instead takes time to discuss the major works from the point of view of content, style, technique etc, when he reaches that point in Stendhal’s life at which they were written. This ...”

“... up in the whirl of events and day-to-day politicking. Some historians, following the lead of Lewis Namier, who saw political ideas largely as a rhetorical smokescreen for the advancement of interests, have treated Burke as a mere placeman and hack – albeit one with wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort ...”

“... exposed as a doubly-married man. But bigamous marriages had menaced the innocent long before then. Jane Eyre had a narrow escape in 1847. Some of the zeal with which novelists seized on the theme grows out of the instability, social and geographical, of the period. This was the age of the railway, which made cheap mass transport available for the first ...”

“... might take. ‘We don’t know how close we are to the edge of this waterfall,’ said Dr Jane Lubchenco from Oregon. She warned that the new inrush of fresh water could lead to a change in the North Atlantic currents, including the Gulf Stream. The global warming that occurred 12,000 years ago, following the brief Younger Dryas glaciation, had shut ...”

“... just as Albert’s radiant bride or the reclusive widow of Windsor, but as the imperious queens of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, an ageless mother in a child’s alphabet book, even a dominatrix of pornographic fantasy. As Munich reads them, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are haunted by her presence, and so too is Rider Haggard’s She, whose deathless queen ...”

“... excessively linear, solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the ...”

“... and disrespect for national traditions, but also singled out two ‘former Labour activists’, Lewis Goodall and Rianna Croxford, for special criticism. Goodall, Newsnight’s policy editor, who pursued the story of the government’s school exams fiasco with unusual tenacity, is a particular bête noire for the Tories: Gibb tweeted to ask whether there ...”

“... Andrew, known to everybody as Sam, was 42, an ex-serviceman. His wife, Jean, was 40. She had been Jane Culross Third in 1942, when they got married at St Mungo’s R.C. Church. They were just round the corner from Sam’s parents, who lived in a tenement on Ronald Street that was being prepared for demolition. There were twelve Samson children and they filled ...”

“... Great Tradition. (‘The great children’s novelists,’ Inglis begins unequivocally, ‘are Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome, William Mayne and Philippa Pearce.’) What they may be charged with is not treating this fact with the seriousness it deserves: not, indeed, considering even the possibility that it might ...”

“... Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia ...”

“... all the concrete details as well can leave you feeling bored with their brilliance – Wyndham Lewis is an outstanding example. But a writer who supplies the concrete details and leaves out the indispensable points can only exhaust you. Mrs Krantz is right to pride herself on the accuracy of her research into every department of the high life. What she ...”