“... My grandmother in 1949 was still wearing the long duster coats she had worn in 1920 and Queen Mary looked like an Edwardian lady all her life: dying in the Fifties, she still dressed as she had in 1910. Look at Ford Madox Brown’s Work: only the middle and upper classes are dressed in a contemporary way; the workmen, the flower-seller and the poorer ...”

“... playfulness and teasing. We would chat about the current review he was always writing (‘Mary-Kay keeps me under the lash’), and I could feel what a desolating defeat it was when, late in his illness, he had to acknowledge that he wasn’t going to be able to review the last book he had been sent. It was a selection of the letters of Louis ...”

“... rape reported to have taken place in 2015 at the home of one of the Times’s book critics. Norton halted shipments and cancelled a second print run; the panels, interviews and book festival events instantly vaporised. What began as a parade float was a runaway dumpster fire.Let us backtrack a bit. Not too far back: just far enough to present a portrait ...”

“... A Secret Sisterhood, who devote part of their book to Charlotte’s ‘hidden’ friendship with Mary Taylor, a friendship which is mostly hidden in the sense that we know relatively little about it: there are only a few surviving letters between them, and Taylor’s correspondence with Gaskell. It’s not uninteresting to learn more about Taylor, who moved ...”

“... timetable of the Resurrection would just have suited the programme-makers; the angel appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden was probably Alan Titchmarsh. 17 February. Though she complains about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today ...”