“... than to pray silently, to say things from you to God. It is easier, indeed, to pray to the Virgin Mary than to God Almighty. And easier to ask her for something – to find lost keys or to cure an illness – than it is to pray in the abstract. But it is very hard to pray if your relationship to words themselves is as fastidious, suspicious, self-conscious ...”

“... in command of troops of the London Foot Association, who opened fire on looters taking part in the Gordon Riots. The painting shows him standing at the head of his musket-wielding soldiers, the mob in the foreground passing chairs and swag from the windows above. There’s also the delicate question of William Swiney Turner, Sir Barnard’s son, a clerk in the ...”

“... Aunt Li weeps a great deal but Aunt Annie has a permanent smile and likes to dress up as Queen Mary or a Cossack or a Spanish dancer – embarrassing Norman with this gear when she collects him from school. The grandfather does not talk to Norman but conducts loud, familiar conversations with God. He breeds dangerous gamecocks (frightening to Aunt Li, who ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon and philology. Later a series of women writers and editors – Evelyn Scott, Caroline Gordon, Katherine White, Eve Auchincloss – would offer nurture and support. But Stafford never had much respect for women. The women writers she admired show up in marginal, often diminished ways in the biographies. She named her cat George Eliot, and planted ...”

“... which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are interested in ...”

“... against Glyn. She met King Alfonso through her sister, the fashionable dressmaker Lady Lucy Duff Gordon, who had his queen as client. Once, the King nipped up four flights of stairs to flirt with Glyn in her newly-painted purple salon: ‘In response to his amorous words Elinor told him that she found the love of kings too passing. She preferred their ...”

“... invoking the example set by one couple she knew – probably the Quaker writers William and Mary Howitt. From 1853 she was friends with a second, unmarried couple of similar qualities: Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes. Both Bodichon and Evans found the other’s warmth, intensity and sincerity immensely sympathetic. On reading a review of Adam Bede in ...”

“... doctor was visiting. In Wortley the good doctors were Dr Slaney and Dr Moneys. In Armley it was Dr Gordon and Dr Dalrymple, who lanced a boil on Dad’s neck before resuming his Sunday dinner. 2/6.12 November, Yorkshire. There is one staircase in the cottage, and at the top of it the landing and a resident spider. On duty hearing one coming up the stairs, it ...”

“... in persuading Mr Parkinson to stay with his wife was the terrible fear that his eldest daughter, Mary, might be forced back onto the heroin she had just managed to live without – thanks, in no small part, to the long hours Mr Parkinson had spent with her: ‘Parkinson knew that it was the love of a father which she really needed to help her through the dog ...”

“... Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey and Forster. Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Waterlow were also invited but fell by the wayside. Even by Bloomsbury standards it was an exclusive set. The members were all related by blood or marriage or, which weighed more heavily with some of them, by friendships formed as ...”

“... trophies that includes a woman’s glass eye acquired by the same means. ‘I don’t know where Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about,’ a Milledgeville aunt once commented in horror, ‘but it was certainly not in my house.’ Regina’s reaction can best be inferred from the advice Mrs Fox offers her ailing son in ‘The Enduring ...”

“... its last film – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – in November 1976.When Gary Painter and Gordon Barr, who run the Scottish Cinemas and Theatres website, were allowed into the building in 2005, two years after the leisure centre closed, it seemed as if ‘the projectionists had simply thrown dust sheets over the projectors and closed the doors.’ The ...”

“... 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue ...”

“... ferment, is very striking. His only experience even with a crowd seems to have been a dip in the Gordon Riots when he was a boy. His reluctance to take risks that others accepted must have been in part temperamental. Yet did it not also reflect the lie-low mentality of the background from which he probably came? The notion of an Everlasting Gospel afforded a ...”

“... than the study of a few dramatic episodes strongly coloured by royal personalities (the rule of Mary Queen of Scots, the Forty-Five), but also that the stream of Jacobite sentiment, intrigue and effort is more complex than has traditionally been allowed. Scottish Jacobite episodes have frequently been offered to the public either as stirring narrative or as ...”