“... 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 ...”

“... about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The usual suspects are close on his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great ...”

“... hostile. Women who talk about clothes mark themselves out as stupid, vulgar or malicious. In Mansfield Park the culpably inert Lady Bertram is ‘a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa’. Mrs Elton in Emma condemns herself when she asks Jane Fairfax’s opinion as to whether she should put a particular trim on her white and ...”

“... of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely spiritual and devotional work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire’. More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and ...”

“... can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced,’ she wrote of Katherine Mansfield. ‘It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.’ Such is the case with her own work. There is something redundant in writing about Death Comes for the Archbishop; scholars quote the same passages, ones of surpassing ...”

“... and said goodbye. The first long season of mourning was over and a new darkness lay ahead. Elizabeth Campbell talking to a member of the public in September 2017. On​ Monday, 11 December 2017, on Radio 4’s Today programme, it was made clear to Elizabeth Campbell, the new leader of Kensington and Chelsea ...”