“... of free status – as in the case of the mixed-race servant Debora Nassy who, ‘being a brown female or mulatto’ was ‘conceived & born in freedom & also raised as such, without anyone in the world having any kind of claim on her person’, or Zabelinha, from Guinea, and her children, who pass through the archive in 1642 – testify not so much ...”

“... children’s books. Her poems have been collected and admirably annotated by Stuart Curran at the Brown University Women Writers Project. The edition gathers together all the Elegiac Sonnets that appeared in the 1780s and 1790s, and two longish blank verse poems, ‘The Emigrants’ and ‘Beachy Head’, as well as animal fables and occasional verse more ...”

“... London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the gardens to a shaded outdoor restaurant. Amis would barely recognise as lunch the meal most of us eat here: nobody ...”

“... shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison, in Percival Everett’s Erasure Race is America’s most enduring fiction. And for all the relieved, Obama-era sighing over America’s ...”

“... gloss of gore. Another dialectical metaphor, deployed as the Volunteer is leaving the ‘broad brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive ...”

“... late views of the Scottish countryside, for instance, or in the strong-armed nun who shovels brown earth from a grave in the 1858 Vale of Rest. At such points, Millais rubs shoulders with Jean-François Millet, his near homonym in France, and with 19th-century Realism in general. But then The Vale of Rest, with its graveyard trees black against the late ...”

“... age of 17, Florence Warden was taught by finishing governesses – she was not employed as one. Elizabeth Linington writes her Vic Varallo (not ‘Vatallo’) novels as Lesley Egan, not in her own name. There are two hands at work in the Alice Perrin entry, one of whom thinks the author published her first book in 1901 (wrong), another who thinks it was ...”

“... the power of the institution to absorb and neutralise new fashions – and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s convincing demonstration that the New Historicists haven’t really given enough thought to history, or even to the sense in which the word ‘historicism’ has formerly been used. This chimes with Fish’s observation that in the ...”

“... Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the leather of his shoes. He evokes the prosperous farming community of ...”

“... of Isabel de Madariaga’s book has been cropped down to the essential features: the mournful brown eyes, the long, slightly beaked nose, the plump little mouth nestling in the silver-black whorls of a beard which bleeds out to the edge of the paper. On the inside of the back flap is the caption. ‘Tsar Ivan IV’, it reads. It isn’t him. It is not a ...”

“... right, was taken in to see him in his coffin. The steadying influence was their Yorkshire nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, tenderly described in Charlotte’s article ‘An Old Servant’: ‘as fixed a part of the Universe as the bath (cruelly cold in winter) into which she plunged us every morning, and the stars to which she pointed through the high ...”

“... and services on one side and family apartments on the other.The Renaissance finally arrived during Elizabeth’s reign. She was less greedy for buildings than her father and was a patron by proxy, shrewdly encouraging ambitious courtiers to build glamorous houses for her entertainment, rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her ...”

“... justice, tax evasion, squandering public money and undermining democracy. Once the Burrell and Brown/ Havlik trials collapsed, the finger pointed directly at the Sovereign herself, who emerged (depending on one’s preferred theory) as Machiavellian, culpably misinformed, vindictive or simply gaga. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is a mighty waste of ...”

“... boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us ...”

“... as she sometimes saw herself, and as she wished to be seen, as the political reincarnation of Elizabeth I, and as the central inspirational figure of her reign, who to a large extent personally determined its political dynamics, and – ‘for 12 hectic years – succeeded in overcoming the limitations of her sex and ill-health to impose her views on the ...”