“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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.’ ...”

“... The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and swing, surrounded by triangular patches of bush and mucky flowerbed. Man-made grass-slopes rose to the side of them, bordered by the kerb and a car-park marked out with paint. Those rocks and slopes, for many of us, were our first domain, and they’d prove themselves equal to representing the entire universe. The way to the other squares in the scheme ...”

“... Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Margaret Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in 1931, going around to the galleries. We went to the Pierre Colle Gallery in the Rue de la Boétie where there was a show of Dali’s. Dali came in poor and emaciated. He had no suit jacket and wore a ...”

“... Turnbull, he was one of the ‘most well-known anthropologists’ of the 20th century, along with Margaret Mead and Louis Leakey. For many of the more austere members of the profession, to say that these three are ‘well-known anthropologists’ is a bit like saying that Vanna White is a well-known lexicographer. To be fair, each of them did something that ...”

“... giving in to him. For Grigg it was the social exclusiveness that was objectionable; for Princess Margaret it was the inclusiveness: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ For Prince Philip, the main enthusiast for abolition, it was presumably the agonising boredom. The passage of time has done little to improve the image of ...”