“... distinction can’t be quite so clear. There’s talk in these essays of Henry James dictating to Mary Weld (she records that it took 194 days to dictate The Wings of the Dove but makes no mention of content or quality) and of Erle Stanley Gardner’s fiction factory, with his suite of Della Streets banging out the latest Perry Mason case. U.A. Fanthorpe is ...”

“... evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that ...”

“... exile and death. Before Wilde’s self-destructive vanity and narcissistic love for Lord Alfred Douglas impelled him to prosecute the Marquis of Queensberry, his position had been that of an ironic dandy in a brutalised and hypocritical society. Wilde defined dandyism as ‘the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty’ and by this definition the ...”

“... is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and ...”

“... different from the one around them. In a bold-faced piece of bohemianism, the utopianists of Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which ...”

“... seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime ...”

“... fighter? It depends on who is telling the story. Robin is, in many ways, conservative: he worships Mary (but opposes the corrupt church) and reveres the king (but hates the corrupt nobility). His loathing of certain churchmen comes not from anti-clericalism but from piety: he goes to Mass at peril of his life, but in Martin Parker’s 1632 ballad, ‘A True ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... their mother took them with her on a trip to Italy, following in the footsteps of Norman Douglas and accompanied by her admirer and mentor Irving Davis. When Davis’s stepdaughter joined them she objected to the children’s presence and so unworried was Gray about them that she gave them £20 and told them to hitchhike back to London. It took them ...”

“... husband, the eye surgeon Sir William Wilde, had been over-attentive to an unbalanced young woman, Mary Travers, who sued Lady Wilde for libel. Had Sir William violated the girl under chloroform? All Dublin speculated. Lady Wilde stood by her husband, but would have done better, we are told, to break down in the witness-box rather than display indifference ...”

“... also the pre-election campaign which he conducted in order to steal the initiative from Sir Alec Douglas Home, who declined to go to the country until the last moment. And I came to like him a great deal. When he retired on 16 March 1976, I felt as if his presence had filled the best years of my life. It was like the death of an estranged father. In those ...”

“... his eloquence, wit and rakishness; he had figured in the greatest civil trial of his times, the ‘Douglas Cause’ over the rightful inheritance of one of Scotland’s most powerful dynasties. But there remained something amateurish about his approach to the law. Boswell worked hard enough on his briefs, but, as his colleagues felt, he took everything too ...”

“... various feminisms staked out by Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, Carolee Schneemann and Mary Kelly. Buchloh’s discussions of German photography from August Sander to Andreas Gursky are fascinating, and he pays welcome heed to Valie Export and Martha Rosler. It is also Buchloh who presides over the authors’ shared reflection on another recurring ...”

“... Hunt her Booke not his’. Another woman wrote in her copy of The English Midwife Enlarged: ‘Mary Hillyer her book/god give her grace ther/unto look not to look but/to understand larn [learning] is beter/then house or land.’ The woodcut birth figures in these books were not images drawn from observation – pregnant cadavers for anatomical drawing were ...”

“... The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”