“... Christened Emma after her mother, whose later influence upon her was slight, the 11th of Sir Charles Tennant’s 15 children – three were born after he had remarried at the age of 75 – was to become famous and indeed notorious as Margot. W.E. Gladstone, allegedly more captivated by the challenge of the rhyme than by the personality of the 25-year-old woman who visited him at Hawarden in 1889, composed four stanzas of decidedly un-Homeric verse, each revolving around her name: ‘Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ...”

“... often, every time we left the house it almost seemed, against ‘stopping with strange men’, my mother never liked my brother and me to go to the pictures on our own, but only once did I come to any harm and then not really.In 1944 we had moved, disastrously as it turned out, from Leeds to Guildford, where we stayed for a year, so at that time I would be ...”

“... Her parents separated when she was a toddler, and she was farmed out with an aunt. Only when her mother married again, this time to a rightwing Chicago surgeon called Loyal Davis, was Nancy able to begin the climb out of her unsatisfactory origins. She dropped her real father and got Davis to adopt her. She began to lose her puppy fat. And she enrolled in ...”

“... when he visited. Ann Yearsley, the poetry-writing wife of a failed small-time farmer, and the mother of six children, had been scraping an existence by various means, including collecting scraps of food from the gentry houses where she sold milk. One of those houses was the Bristol school run by Hannah More’s older sisters, a remarkably successful ...”

“... they let London invade them. Excursionists arriving at the chalk quarry, to the east of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford, just off Watling Street, find themselves in a sort of processing plant or customs post for asylum seekers. A channel port (on go-slow). Bluewater skulks in the desert like the Tunisian set ...”

“... and schooldays had been lonely and unhappy, and they were made harder to bear by his distant mother, his disappointed father, and his more robust and much-preferred sister. He had married a woman renowned for her beauty rather than her brains, largely because he had been told it was his duty to do so. By her he had promptly fathered two healthy ...”

“... tale and even science fiction (one of the heroine’s admirers comes from the planet Venus). The Queen, the heroine’s mother, is befriended by a fairy. The religion of the slightly Orientalised court is that of ‘the Goddess Vishnu’. This travesty of Hindu belief offers a useful ...”

“... good would be done if Tythes were taken away entirely, and describe him burying his own mother – as I did – because the High Priest of the Parish … did not pay her remains the respect he ought to do. I have never recovered the Shock.’ Austen’s response was to write ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’, a rebuke ...”

“... embarrassment, ‘with Frank alone turning to the right for St Aloysius and the rest of us’ – mother and three children – ‘turning left for St Paul’s’. This, she felt, was no way to conduct family life. Once converted, she found confession something of a problem. One day, entering the box with ‘rather a blank mind’, she asked the priest ...”

“... a profession of Protestant faith in Shakespeare’s own hand, even a letter to the bard from Queen Elizabeth herself flowed from his ready quill. And once Ireland had sorted out a supply of ink and techniques for making paper look old, why not write versions of King Lear and Hamlet which omitted the awkward bawdy ...”

“... prince who wakes just in time, which the fiction and verse of Sidney and Spenser had used to urge Queen Elizabeth to mend her ways. What the editors of The Crisis of 1614 have enterprisingly done for that year could have been attempted for a number of other occasions in early modern English history. Whether or not we call ...”

“... in the King’s fate a more personal message. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ the ageing Queen Elizabeth demanded, mindful of her fallen favourite, the Earl of Essex, and his forlorn attempt to rally support for his claim to the throne by staging the tragedy of Richard’s fall ‘forty times in open streets and ...”

“... man’. ‘To crake’ was a verb of East Anglian origin, familiar to Roe’s Norfolk-born mother, meaning to boast, or jest loudly – we still ‘crack’ a joke. For Das, always sensitive to language, this moment offered Roe ‘a flash of recognition of something deeply familiar, even homely, in the Mughal emperor’s very human ...”

“... of resonance. Hermione is both the name of Helen’s daughter in Greek mythology and the wronged mother/wife in The Winter’s Tale. H.D. was a writer, after all, whose mother was named Helen and who had a profound visionary experience of ‘writing-on-the-wall’ in Greece (Hellas) in 1920. This was a woman who named her ...”

“... but spent it, ending up living in a council flat with her youngest son. Her elder son and her mother no longer speak to her. She did time in Holloway, ostensibly for perjury, and she was banned from Vidal Sassoon’s salon when the respectable society women complained about having to share a backwash with her. In 1967 she became a ‘silicon ...”