“... Harold Stanley Ede​ , who was known for most of his life as Jim, lived through nearly the whole of the 20th century. Born in 1895, he died in 1990, having, as his modest epitaph in St Peter’s church in Cambridge puts it, ‘created Kettle’s Yard and helped to preserve this church’. Kettle’s Yard, the house and gallery that still holds Ede’s collection of 20th-century art, as well as hosting exhibitions and concerts, is the place where generations of undergraduates, including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When Deborah Cavendish,​ duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica, one of Deborah Devonshire’s older siblings, called ‘the Mitford Industry’ has powered on in spite of the absence of its principals (and in some cases because of it), refuelled by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel ...”

“... In February​ 1803 the Monthly Magazine offered a backhanded endorsement of women artists in its regular ‘Retrospect of Fine Arts’: ‘In an age so generally marked by the frivolity and dissipation of our women of rank, the few who by the cultivation of the fine arts emancipate themselves from these fashionable fetters, and display the elegance and taste so fascinating in the female sex, are entitled to peculiar honours ...”

“... 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 ...”