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“... filial man and a devoted husband. The account of that remote and not instantly attractive figure, Douglas Hogg, first Viscount Hailsham, Attorney-General and later Lord Chancellor in the Baldwin era, is impressive for what it tells us both about the parent, a model of old, Scottish-shaped Protestant rectitude, and about the son who without affectation loved ...”

“... every imaginable facility from changing-room and showers to a pantry for drinks and tea-making. Douglas Hurd’s two sons learned to swim at Chequers and so did mine.’ Chequers deserves a whole chapter, there are so many tributes to be paid. To the telephone girls, ‘quite simply the best telephone girls in the world’, who go down to operate the ...”

“... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking ...”

“... without the ‘very’. A poet called Lord Alfred Tennyson, not to be confused with Alfred Lord Douglas, briefly surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ...”

“... not, as he was in this book’s 1973 precursor, Billion Year Spree, a trifle over-persuaded by Mary Shelley? There is of course much to be said for seeing Frankenstein as simultaneously a Gothic novel and a work of Science Fiction, and Aldiss says it well. Mary Shelley had the right scientific background; the ...”

“... Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist heroine sans pareil, didn’t approve of heroines. Great Women – or ‘icons’, as Elaine Showalter prefers to call the three centuries’ worth of feminist ‘rule-breakers and path-blazers’ celebrated in her new book – get short shrift in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: I shall not lay any stress on the example of a few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution … Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d’Eon etc ...”

“... by jealousy. What most upset the ever polite Englishman was the effrontery of his arch-rival, Douglas Cooper. Penrose’s letters to Picasso mentioning Cooper are not always entirely truthful: from time to time, as Cowling puts it, ‘personal animosity got in the way of strict accuracy.’ Cooper didn’t tell the truth either. Angry at not having been ...”

“... were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822. Shortly thereafter, Byron and Trelawny embarked for Greece, Mary Shelley’s troubled and troubling step-sister Claire Clairmont departed to become a governess in Russia, and in 1823 Mary and her last surviving child returned to the England she had not seen since 1818. ‘The ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... World War poetry cannot do without reference back to that of the First; and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although ...”

“... illegitimate children before his marriage. The year Oscar was born his father began an affair with Mary Travers, the daughter of a colleague. She was also his patient. When Sir William tried to end the relationship, Travers claimed that it had begun while she was under anaesthetic. She wrote angry letters to the Wildes and published a pamphlet about a girl ...”

“... his son Henry seem, paradoxically, to have been inherited from a mother who was illiterate. Born Mary Ann Ball, the eldest child of a large family that had migrated from Tipton to Birmingham, she could not be spared from her labours at home during what should have been her schooldays, and when, in her late middle age, her granddaughter ...”

“... America’s intellectual élite and ensure runaway sales. The Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, in a comment for Houghton Mifflin, called Silent Spring ‘the most revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. It was selected by the Book of the Month Club and Douglas introduced it in the Club News as ‘the ...”

“... For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance promises an occasion to assay the limits of the canon, for Butts’s second novel, Armed with Madness, first published in 1928, is, I would say, a masterpiece of Modernist prose ...”

“... fraud? James Barry arrived in Edinburgh from Ireland in 1809, accompanied by a middle-aged woman, Mary Anne Bulkley, whom he introduced as his aunt. Slight, with reddish blond hair, Barry dressed in a surtout, a sort of overcoat, which he never took off, not even in hot weather. At the University School of Anatomy, where he enrolled on a three-year course, he ...”