“... It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the Harewood estate, home these days ...”

“... Borden with an axe’ – always equips her, just as we always visualise St Catherine rolling along her wheel, the emblem of her passion. Soon, in just as many clothes as Miss Lizzie wears, if less fine, Bridget, the servant girl, will slop kerosene on a sheet of last night’s newspaper crumpled with a stick or two of kindling. When the ...”

“... Emily’s fatalism. There is, she writes, ‘no institutional habitation for a woman so bared as Catherine Earnshaw, as bared as nature itself in its bedrock stretch’.Group biographies of unrelated women generally fill me with suspicion, but I can better understand Gordon’s agenda than that of the authors of A Secret Sisterhood, who devote part of their ...”