“... an industrious but uninspired architect who helped to bungle a commission to build the Vestry Hall in Hampstead – was unfairly disparaged by his wife’s more prosperous family. He was humble and kind-hearted, too easily persuaded to spend money on grand Bloomsbury houses, and fond of visiting the orphans in Coram’s Fields. His pretty wife liked to ...”

“... 2024, London’s annual Mid-Century Modern fair celebrated its 21st anniversary in Christison Hall, a light, airy, wood and concrete ceremonial space in the grounds of Dulwich College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the ...”

“... By now my professional relationship with Peter was very close. Our families had met and my wife Catherine and Colette Fuller were friends. We found a field south of London, not far out, surrounded by trees and with a stream in which the children could paddle while the adults ate, drank, talked and snoozed. Peter’s subsequent enthusiasm for nature was ...”

“... of the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little ...”

“... of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor women extricating themselves from adverse circumstances were for twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right statistics, the nation’s favourite ...”

“... a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in the hall – as ‘a toy for her lover’. In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is the person who sees others as playthings. The enemy is the writer.At the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if ...”

“... Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier ...”

“... mills, crushed to death in the railway yard of Carnegie’s steelworks’. His mother was born Catherine Bowe in County Wexford in 1910, near where the rivers Barrow and Suir merge. Joyce was born in England in 1945 and was first taken to visit Mayo when he was three.In his books, he is precise about placenames and more content dealing with a parish or a ...”

“... from revealing that her late son, Sebastian, was homosexual. It features a 27-year-old Taylor as Catherine Holly looking almost impossibly beautiful in a range of outfits, including a chest-hugging dark sundress and a clinging white one-piece swimming costume. Her character’s beauty is central to the plot because in the flashback sequences we learn that ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... Ní Dhuibhne’s compilation of memoirs, Look! It’s a Woman Writer! ‘Thirty years ago,’ Catherine Dunne remembers, ‘we had the infamous Field Day Anthology, which arrogantly excluded the writings of most women: but that was then.’So​ what is now? Repeated, high-profile exclusions, such as the almost complete absence of women dramatists and ...”