“... We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death ...”

“... This​ isn’t an essay about clothes, exactly, nor is it about fashion, quite. It is about women and clothes and something that happens between them that we could think of as a kind of third rail of female experience. I’ve thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle ...”

“... In​ her new book, Rosemary Hill characterises the achievements of more than thirty antiquaries of the late 18th and early 19th century whose records of mysterious inscriptions, stone circles, monastic chronicles and ruined abbeys, and whose collections of rusty weaponry, stained glass and old ballads, provided new ways by which the past could be recovered – and also, of course, invented ...”

“... naive, but we still owe a great deal to his enterprising fidelity. One of the many achievements of Rosemary Hill’s masterful biography is that she does justice to the drama of Pugin’s life without losing sight of its gravity. She is not blind to his faults, for it is clear that he could be stubbornly self-involved, and infuriatingly limited in his ...”

“... there was peace; unfinished at his death in 2017, it has been seamlessly completed by his widow, Rosemary Hill. In Interwar, Stamp is scrupulously equitable and veers towards a sort of stylistic indifferentism: everything engages him, even junk neo-Georgian buildings that are beyond meretricious. He celebrates variety, eccentricity and figures from ...”

“... who wants the typist’s side of this brief, bleak encounter might find a version of it in Rosemary Tonks’s poems, with their undertow of sexual menace and carnal scavenging. ‘Love Territory’, the opening poem of Bedouin of the London Evening, her new Collected (Bloodaxe, £12), starts: He’s timid with women, and the dusk is excruciating The ...”

“... as Jeremy Treglown does very effectively in his biographies of Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett, as Rosemary Hill does in her magical biography of Pugin – but to me a lively new aspect of the form is to be found in the work of those who involve themselves most visibly in their subjects’ dilemmas and who name their own troubles in the narrative as and ...”

“... something of a shock.’ In​ 1951, Carter passed the 11-plus and won a funded place at Streatham Hill and Clapham High, a girls-only direct-grant grammar school. She wrote about ‘the glum, sullen loathing that overcame me’ as she ‘daily slouched and dawdled’ her way there, and how much she hated maths and PE. But she was great at English and French ...”

“... results in a comeuppance. The whole thing is tempered by the ‘good-natured assumption’ that Rosemary Hill identified in Cooper’s Class, that ‘everyone is a snob about something and to that extent we are all ridiculous.’ There is mercifully little of the product placement that makes some airport fiction unreadable; instead the books rely on ...”

“... is plenty of space to dream and wonder and imagine and – let’s face it – make stuff up. As Rosemary Hill points out in her wonderful book on Stonehenge, archaeologists sometimes claim ownership of the past, but the truth is that it belongs to all of us – and, as the case of Stonehenge shows, archaeologists are capable of doing plenty of ...”

“... well to forget your own advice. 2. Last April I began to write an account of the life and death of Rosemary Nelson, a 40-year-old solicitor in the town of Lurgan in County Armagh. At 12.40 p.m. on 15 March she got into her car outside her house at 5 Ashgrove Grange. As she drove away a bomb went off in the car. She lost both legs and suffered fatal abdominal ...”

“... dropped. The green heath silvered: every leaf singled out like rosemary. The well went milky as a dead eye, smoked with ice, though I caught sight of something as the surface froze – a clay doll, a corp criadh, busied with pins – and I started down for home. Where far below I saw the loch-water going from grey to ...”

“... Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan (a well-named pair) have assembled the testimonies of a lot of naughty American nuns and ex-nuns who chafed under the restrictions of convent life. One restriction in particular galled them all: the embargo on sexual activity. Few nuns, it seems, are natural celibates. Fewer still are heterosexual ...”

“... Knoxes and Burne-Jones. Such details come mainly from Fitzgerald’s letters to her daughters. As Rosemary Hill noticed when reviewing them for this paper (25 September 2008), none of them is to Valpy. He didn’t keep them, Lee says, but there was more to it than that. As the eldest and as a boy, Valpy perhaps felt the Knox pressure more than his ...”

“... enough tragedy of their own, enough worry, without having to deal with the committal hearing of a Rosemary West, whose charge-sheet, if proved true, could make her the most gruesome female killer Britain has ever known. Those charges have of course still to be proved, and the proceedings this week in Dursley will end in a decision about whether the case can ...”