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“... best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her way in a masculine environment by behaving like a man, only more so. Cooke is careful to avoid special pleading. Her tactful descriptions of Smithson as a woman who ‘did not invite closeness’, and to whom ...”

“... the surgeon’s hand half a year’, during which he ‘did undergo much pain and sorrow’. Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories.Strangways was himself a victim. The man who ...”

“... 2009 to 2014, the number of cases referred to the Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Service rose from 97 to 697. Transgender children in the UK today have the option of delaying puberty by taking hormone blockers; they can take cross-sex hormones from 16 and opt for sex reassignment surgery from the age of 18. Cassie Wilson’s daughter Melanie ...”

“... His Holiness James Kelman? That would be a turn-up for the Booker. I would imagine that Sister Margaret Atwood, or Brother Banville, is more likely to win the prize. On the short list is Rose Tremain, who teaches at the University of East Anglia. Two of the judges are feminists, and one of them also teaches at the ...”

“... efficient and comprehensive’ service to every British citizen. Colchester’s new public library rose to the challenge magnificently (i.e. better than Chelmsford – unfairly, locals thought, chosen to be Essex’s county town).My grandmother would never have dared to join that library. Apart from anything else, its previous site – it was founded as a ...”

“... companion and host. He tells the story here of a previous Australian Labor leader who told Margaret Whitlam, his wife, that no one would ever get him going to South-East Asia: ‘You never know what you’ll catch.’ Mr Whitlam, by contrast, is rarely happier than when abroad. He translated the menu for me in Sofia, discoursing on the etymology of ...”

“... third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This summer, Murray won Wimbledon and Chris Froome followed Wiggins to victory in the Tour de France. The cup ran over. There’s plenty of material for a different story, too. Woodward followed his world cup triumph with a poor Six Nations ...”

“... may well ask whether, any more than Stow, she has avoided looking at this lost world through rose-tinted spectacles. How sure can we be that the pre-Reformation city enjoyed unity in religion? If it did, in any significant measure, this was a unity secured through the reconciliation of difference and diversity, the diversity of 106 parishes, perhaps as ...”

“... version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently resourceful mind, and a persuasive style, of course, you can stimulate them by going for a walk along the local beach or by taking ...”

“... in ironic rather than merely parasitic relation to that of Waller’s original ‘Goe lovely Rose’. In one respect the choice of Pound as an instance of the writer traversing the ‘enemy’s country’ seems dangerous. Hill writes of Pound that ‘the world’s obtuseness, imperviousness, its active or passive hostility to valour and vision, is not ...”

“... originally Scottish by way of Ulster, Quakers or Presbyterians amending to Anglicanism as they rose by professional achievement from the middle classes to a confluence with the upper. The school, university and Army pages – Eton, Christ Church and the Rifle Brigade – are littered with characters, or at any rate names, from a Waugh ...”

“... is given as Hennegouwen, Henry (of Trastamara) as Heinrich (why not Enriquez for that matter?), Margaret (of Anjou) as Margareth, and so on. To be translated more than once is the mark of a classic, and automatically makes one wonder how this one is faring after 78 years. How enduring the appeal of its subject-matter remains can be gauged from the ...”

“... and his own new palace by the Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its progeny’s progeny which must soon follow, securing the dynasty in perpetuity. But as London thrilled to the rich displays of chivalry, roses, pomegranates, castles, senators and ...”

“... they can hear his voice on the radio in the hotel bar below. He is present in this novel much as Margaret Thatcher is in The Ploughman’s Lunch – to root the story in the real. McEwan uses current affairs much as a rock band uses drums or a salesman uses a smile. The fact that Macmillan is still in power also helps us to be convinced by Florence’s ...”

“... circles met, the Atlantic, Europe and the Commonwealth, and had unique authority in the West. Margaret Thatcher has been unsophisticated in these matters and unusually atavistic. She sees that Reagan has ‘nothing between the ears, poor dear’, but has consistently given him unnecessary support. She has refused to accept the implications of Europe. And ...”