“... traced these circles than she characteristically complicates the picture. On issues like the first Reform Bill, the two groups were sharply opposed, yet both ‘belonged to a new middle-class intelligentsia who repudiated aristocratic privilege and wanted change’, and both conceived of themselves – if avant la lettre – as avant garde: in fact they ...”

“... experience of kinship that has hitherto eluded her and in the sense that it enables her for the first time, apparently, to contemplate her origins. The forbidden spaces of the harem have long served as a template for Western fantasies, and if Kinski’s celluloid adventures suggest that some of us are now more inclined to look Eastward for the family than ...”

“... difficult and continuous attention which I gave to everything, it was impossible for me to cry.’ First published in 1986 and now appearing in an anonymous translation from Macmillan, Vincent-Buffault’s book concerns French tears rather than the British or American kind, but the general trajectory of the history she traces is a familiar one. Like other ...”

“... on thinness – discussed here by Carol Gilligan (LRB, 10 March) – this would not be the first time in current memory that popular magazines heralded a turn toward a ‘softer’ or rounder look for women, only to continue advertising the same taut and rigorously pared-down bodies in their pages. In fact, as Bordo shows, the ideal female form has ...”

“... when the couple reached Orléans, but friendlier exchanges eventually followed. Included in that first dreaded packet – her ‘death warrant’ as she called it – was a letter from Mr Barrett himself. But Elizabeth’s letter to him was returned unopened, and her subsequent efforts proved no more successful: five years’ worth were returned, their seals ...”

“... Heaven knows there’s nothing abnormal in the whole account. It’s only that I happen, for the first time, very likely, in the world’s history to give the account. Several times he warns Woolf (then working as a colonial administrator in Ceylon) that keeping the letters is dangerous; but rather than encourage their destruction, he urges that the ...”

“... a Boston marriage with a cousin who taught science at a local women’s college. But during the First World War she succumbed to ‘melancholy’ and grew ‘crazy’ enough (the uncle again) to be sent to an institution. (She died two years later.) Meanwhile, Jeanie tried one fashionable cure for hysteria after another, including a stint of water therapy ...”

“... great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and part-owner of the Covent Garden Theatre, Charles Kemble had inherited a property ...”

“... was brought ‘to an age for writing letters’. This was A Small Boy and Others (1913), the first of three autobiographical volumes, the last unfinished at the time of his death, that James dictated to Bosanquet and that have recently been reissued, together with some shorter pieces and Bosanquet’s own memoir of her time with James. The small boy who ...”

“... of list-making has discouraged would-be biographers. Exactly a half-century separated Oliphant’s first novel, a fictitious autobiography called Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland (1849), from the publication of her own fragmentary autobiography, expurgated and rearranged by her surviving dependants two years after her death. By the last decades of the ...”

“... The daughter of the future Duke of Kingston had access to an extraordinary library (the first private collection in England to have a printed catalogue); and whether or not she had already succeeded in ‘stealing the Latin language’, as she later put it, by the age of 14 she was turning out imitations of Ovid and Virgil as well as poetry and ...”

“... miraculously well.’ Fromentin did not confine his equivocal praise to genre painting, but the first major assault on received ideas about Dutch realism focused on those representations of anonymous figures and commonplace acts that had come to be classified as genre. In the 1960s, an influential group of scholars based in Utrecht began to probe the ...”

“... in her daughter’s book but not by Jane Howard) Mead was bisexual. Her affair with her teacher Ruth Benedict lasted for many years, as did that with Geoffrey Gorer. Without these two ‘intense liaisons’ it is unlikely that the bizarre research project known as the Study of Culture at a Distance and its successors would ever have got off the ...”

“... my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure,’ she wrote to Victor and Ruth Gollancz in a rare display of feeling, after they had replaced the copy destroyed with the rest of Macaulay’s flat during the Blitz. Macaulay was the author of 41 books, and an early ‘media intellectual’ whose university education and illustrious ...”

“... was unable to accept Muriel as a patient, but wrote to her recommending his pupil and colleague Ruth Mack (later, Ruth Brunswick), who did analyse her. Anna Freud, in the introduction to Code Name ‘Mary’, makes it clear that she thought Muriel Gardiner’s activities were unique, almost incredible: ‘Those of us ...”