“... agent who came across it by chance in a charity shop. The new edition arrives with tributes from Margaret Atwood, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett, among others, who emphasise Dick’s status as a ‘trailblazing queer English writer’. Have other novelists been influenced by her? I prefer to think of They as inimitable: innovative in structure but ...”

“... Now, however, earlier feminist explorations are being rediscovered in the late stories of Margaret Oliphant and the novels of Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell. Young women writers are finding that they have a Scottish tradition behind them as well as imaginative and ideological links to work from elsewhere. Yet at least as striking is the way in ...”

“... search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible. As in a proto-Pop Idol, lines of would-be Scarletts queued up for ...”

“... was no doubt that more women than men were reading them. For most of the 1860s, Mrs Henry Wood and Margaret Oliphant outsold not only Trollope, but Dickens and Thackeray too. In the 1870s, it was George Eliot who reigned, and when Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd appeared in 1874 the Spectator declared that she must be its real author, and that if she ...”

“... more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla ...”

“... Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their ...”

“... both its abomination and its cathartic redemption.’ He concedes that the catharsis was tough on Rose Broder, Roth’s sister, who was still alive when A Diving Rock on the Hudson was published. ‘This is not pleasant for me,’ she told a reporter. When she threatened to sue, Roth gave her $10,000 and a legal assurance that sibling incest would not feature ...”

“... from there sustained themselves on a single breath. ‘I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose’ is how the first story she published, ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’, begins. Though only some of these are lines she actually heard, very few seem contrived. She’s said to have put stories together bit by bit, sometimes stitching sentences and paragraphs ...”

“... crafted descriptions in Eça de Queirós’s masterly novel The Maias, extremely well rendered in Margaret Jull Costa’s new translation. The novel is set in Lisbon in the 1870s: 1875 to 1878, to be precise, with a couple of flashbacks to establish the family history, and an epilogue placed in 1887, the year before the book was first published. It begins and ...”

“... Sumner Welles, Franklin Roosevelt and the making of New Deal foreign policy). Closest Companion (Margaret Suckley’s diary and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of ...”

“... Apple is out this month.) Less has been written about the history of working-class gardeners. As Margaret Willes acknowledges, the majority of the working classes didn’t have the time or money to cultivate a garden until the 20th century; the worst off, those in cramped tenements or industrial back-to-backs built in the 19th century, had little if any ...”

“... fit in. In ‘What a Thought’, one of the stories newly collected in Dark Tales, a woman called Margaret sits with her husband after dinner. She looks at him with pride, grateful for the care he takes in making her happy. Yet ‘an odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.’ ...”

“... was an isolated figure was increased by a series of personal tragedies. In 1896 he had married Margaret Gladstone, a fellow socialist from a prosperous middle-class family, who was engaged in charitable work in the East End. The couple had six children. In February 1910 their son David died, aged five, from diphtheria. Eight days later, MacDonald’s ...”

“... When​ Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university sector ...”

“... would merely ‘deepen the depression’ and ‘erode the industrial base of our economy’. Margaret Thatcher had come to power in 1979 pledging to cut inflation, then at 10 per cent. In 1980 it rose to 18 per cent, with unemployment at 6.8 per cent and manufacturing output contracting by 8.6 per cent. Following the ...”