“... the occasion with Mark Lemon. All the while Dickens continued his management of Urania Cottage, Angela Burdett Coutts’s home for the reformation of prostitutes, supervising it daily on the most minute matters. He was constantly visiting magistrate’s courts, prisons and other likely places to interview prospective inmates, and appears to have vetted ...”

“... studios today, to brighten things up, I hid my cock between my legs and impersonated a vagina for Angela Douglas. She sunk her head in her hands and moaned “Oh! God – how horrible” and didn’t find it amusing at all. This is where she lacks graciousness.’ He sometimes resorted to the same tactics on the radio show Just a Minute. Asked to speak for ...”

“... legal subjects too – Schor offsets Eliot’s stories of the private life against the language of John Stuart Mill’s public feminism. But, like Jack making connections between all the women readers across the centuries, Schor is prone to treating the material of the novels she writes about as if it were all one novel, with one subject: she moves too ...”

“... street,’ May said in the speech. Timothy praises the rootedness of Labour’s new deputy leader, Angela Rayner, and hymns the Blue Labour project of Maurice Glasman, but fizzes with rage at the naked, un-communitarian ambition of the liberal Cameroon Conservative Justine Greening, who not so fondly recalled ‘all the years I spent growing up in Rotherham ...”

“... to deal with the equally relentless productivity of the Dickens industry? Since his best friend John Forster published The Life of Charles Dickens (1871-76), the vagaries of Dickens’s life and the brilliance of his writing have led to countless attempts to interpret, diagnose or explain the man through the writing, or the writing through the man. Certain ...”

“... George Furth (who did the book for Company and Merrily We Roll Along), James Goldman (Follies), John Weidman (Pacific Overtures and Assassins); Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd); and last but not least James Lapine (whose work is not covered in this volume, but who would do both book and direction on Sunday in the Park with George, Into ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”

“... victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.But ...”

“... in Sheridan’s The Rivals) and the even more occasional dramatic location (as in Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island), the playwrights listed above wrote about England as if they were English. There may be Irish resonances in Waiting for Godot, but Beckett set it in no man’s land and wrote it in France (and when required to make short trips home to ...”

“... fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, “Perhaps it will be born dead.”’Comyns ...”

“... Indeed in his Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (1598), the fittingly named John Manwood playfully suggests that the word ‘forrest’ might be a contraction of ‘For Rest’, denoting a haven like that wood, ‘a league without the town’, nostalgically remembered by Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘where often you and ...”

“... of her talents on the stage. He worked closely with Elizabeth Gaskell and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The distress of abused and vulnerable women moved him to pity, and he made energetic attempts to lift prostitutes out of wretchedness, with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women defying his authority, but he was bored by ...”

“... agenda to the fragility of romance … I’m not big on women looking naive.’ We need you, Angela Carter! We need your help! Carter thoroughly upset the bien pensants with her essay The Sadeian Woman (1978) where she argued that Sade ‘was unusual in his period for claiming rights of free sexuality for women and in installing women as beings of power ...”

“... up at the Spanish port of embarkation, ‘there was a tapping on the glass. We sat very still and John rolled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and salty air and a whiskery face with bright blue eyes.’ This sounds like the authentic memory of a child, and it could have happened anywhere. The adult narrator probably put the salt into the ...”

“... completes my pre-1930 Brazils.’ Unfortunately there is no pre- (or post-, for that matter) 1930 Angela Brazil story called Dulcy plays the game. Margaret plays the game, yes: but that’s by a different author, Winifred Darch. Is this a slip, or is P.D. James playing games, testing the alertness of her readers? It’s a moment of levity, in any case, and ...”