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“... on one of his walking tours, in a remote idyllic valley in north Wales – a parson’s daughter, Jane Gryffydh, ‘the most innocent, the most amiable, the most beautiful girl in existence’. He hadn’t seen or contacted her for eight years, but now he proposed that she become his wife, although by this time Jane was ...”

“... They found Mary Jane Kelly lying on her bed, in the dingy room she rented in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street in Spitalfields. She was about 25 years old, a colleen from County Limerick, ‘possessed of considerable attractions’. Widowed young, she had turned, like thousands of others in late Victorian London, to prostitution ...”

“... something like the opposite of what it meant for Gowing. The aim of the co-curators, David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Smiles, is to set Turner’s last paintings free from what Brown calls the ‘reductive critical stereotypes’ that have been applied to his work by those who are determined to ignore its ...”

“... forty-four, certainly no more than forty-six. How does one know these things? He was short-haired, brown as a hazel nut, trim and remarkably upright of gait, almost as if he were an Indian village lady walking to the well with a water pitcher. He wore a dark, dowdy anorak in the Hebridean rain, a garment that was attractive in its spare austerity. His whole ...”

“... phrase, manages it very effectively in Nothing (1950). The key figure in the novel is the widowed Jane Weatherby, who sees an opportunity to reclaim her ex-lover John Pomfret when their children (her son Philip, his daughter Mary) fall in love. Realising that only one of the two possible Weatherby-Pomfret marriages can take place, with one killing off the ...”

“... beach resorts. A Quaker had invented ‘modesty hoods’ for bathing machines, from one of which Jane Austen went in at Lyme in 1804, observing in a letter to a friend that the sea water was so delicious ‘I stayed in rather too long.’ Resorts like Brighton boasted a permanent horde of elderly gentlemen with telescopes, and ladies began to wear voluminous ...”

“... working as a janitor in a small town under the Forth bridges, I went to see An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s film about her fellow New Zealander, the writer Janet Frame. In the film we see Frame, played by Kerry Fox, recently released from a long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank ...”

“... big-book writer must now be applied to a brief scenario and a setting hardly more ambitious than Jane Austen’s. The ‘white noise’ of the earlier title is death, and DeLillo always has some of the big subjects in mind. In The Body Artist they are, as the jacket copy lets us know at once, space, love and death. A man and a woman are in the kitchen of a ...”

“... than men do. Other things being equal, readers of the same sex will be closer to the meaning of Jane Austen, for instance, than their male counterparts. Where there is a choice, women’s commentary is given priority in the attached bibliographical notes. They know best. This Companion is at least two things. Primarily it is a reference book, a convenient ...”

“... cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow’s inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also have a dialectical point to make. British critics ...”

“... How much are the Poor to be pitied, & the Rich to be blamed!’ the young Jane Austen exclaimed in a marginal note to Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England. Mary Toft, the notorious 18th-century ‘rabbit breeder’, was undoubtedly very poor. But was she to be pitied? Contemporary accounts of her hoax identified her as ‘poor’ in ways that combined sympathy with contempt ...”

“... so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959, Paule Marshall has been weaving a delicate history of the Barbadians who emigrated to America earlier in the century. Stepping off the boats, though not all were so fortunate, the wayfarers arrived in their new homes with nothing ...”

“... perpetuates their dispassionate perspectives and erases their victims all over again.Black and brown men and women were by the later 17th century hardly an uncommon sight in London, especially in the East End, with its mariners and merchants. Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the ...”

“... in oils, an Annunciation triptych commissioned in 1860 for an altar in Brighton, glows sombrely, brown and black, with a spilling of gilt sky and reddish-gold haloes for the Holy Family (Mary is Jane Morris), so that you can forgive the way the third king’s feet stretch out like empty socks. Burne-Jones’s fascination ...”

“... lettuce. But it’s the moment of formal installation that sticks in my memory. Photos by Jane Barlow of the Press Association show a frail but smiling queen extending a hand to the prime minister. Another image shows the queen awaiting Truss’s arrival. She stands beside a log fire – supported by her walking stick, handbag over her arm – the ...”