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“... came out of the Black Hole at Calcutta’, gives me the full tour: John Soane, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the Hardy tree. Building work now, as at the time of the construction of the railway, is causing havoc. Tombs are splitting, monuments leaning drunkenly, holes appearing in the earth. You could, stepping carelessly, tumble into a ...”

“... perhaps even fabrication. His charges were reinforced when the heirs of the famous bluestocking Mary Delany – a cherished mentor of Burney’s who had corresponded with Richardson and Swift – accused her of lying, and made caustic asides about ‘Madame d’Arblay’s well-earned position as a writer of fiction’. ‘Frances d’Arblay’ by Edward ...”

“... some risky moves. Arbitrarily chosen characters from the novels – Lady Susan, Marianne Dashwood, Mary Crawford – speak for their author’s repressed desires. Unsupported guesses, strategically placed in the story, take the weight of the biographer’s argument. Of Austen’s first months in Bath, Tomalin remarks: ‘Jane was schooled to keep up ...”

“... Boerhaave, Hobbes, Locke, Swift, Mandeville, Hume, Gibbon, Erasmus Darwin, Hartley, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Blake, Byron, Coleridge and many, many more are vigorously characterised and placed in an intelligible narrative. Schama is right to say that the author’s death is the more shocking because the book is so exuberantly vital; Porter was at the ...”

“... in the course of these pages that I thought at first the writer had been transfixed with horror at Mary Wollstonecraft’s disgusted account of ‘personal intimacy without affection’ in Maria, Or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), and used the figure of Mr Venables, always ‘drunk to bed’, as a means of primary historical reconstruction. Like Maria ...”

“... on Behn over the last decade, Todd still seems more in tune with the earnest world of Godwin and Wollstonecraft (the subject of much of her earlier work) than with that of Wycherley and the Duchess of Cleveland. Nothing could be less cavalier than the way in which The Secret Life of Aphra Behn trots out the usual anecdotes about the usual suspects, or the ...”