“... all this, it is not surprising that these three books should strike a rather apologetic note. Ruth Dudley Edwards begins her portrait of life in the Diplomatic Corps with the words: ‘Of all British Civil Service departments, the Foreign Office has the most negative public image.’ Her task is both to show how useful the Foreign Office is to British ...”

“... and blinkers are a waste of time and tricky to fit, so ‘debeaking’ becomes necessary; this is first attempted with a blowtorch, then with a soldering-iron, and is finally perfected by means of a patented mini-guillotine equipped with hot blades. The deformed nerves and facial mutilations that result are a surmountable problem. This is one short section in ...”

“... molested by Gerald and George Duckworth, the Stephen sisters’ half-brothers by their mother’s first marriage. Poole drew on these memoirs, on a letter in which Woolf recalled George Duckworth ‘fondling’ her over her Greek lessons, and on the abundant evidence of her intense and life-long ambivalence toward the study of Greek (an uneasy mixture of ...”

“... the crackdown, Orwell’s consigning Boxer to the knacker’s yard seems a more plausible outcome. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a very different Pole. In 1975, with the Booker Prize awarded (to the accompaniment of some chauvinistic protest), it was commonplace to rank her with Conrad. The follow-up to Heat and Dust has been a long time coming. And, although a fine ...”

“... Hunter and Bennet than the vitriolic Granville Sharp Pattison, whose medical career, spanning the first half of the 19th century, went from one acrimonious controversy to another. Born in 1791 the youngest son of a rich Glaswegian merchant, Pattison took up one of the predictable career options, medicine, studying at his native university from 1806 to ...”

“... plenitude than of scarcity. In the introduction to Henry James: The Untried Years (1953), the first of what was to become a five-volume history, Edel announced that he had been compelled to disregard Boswell’s advice that the biographer should let his subject speak for himself rather than ‘melt down’ the materials. Figuratively, at least, Edel saw ...”

“... is, ‘in a place of darkness and pollution’, Edith Wharton’s doomed heroine thinks for the first time of the Furies: ‘She had once picked up, in a house where she was staying, a translation of the Eumenides,’ the novelist writes, ‘and her imagination had been seized by the high terror of the scene where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle, finds ...”

“... by the death of male relatives. Her father died in 1869, the year before she published her first sketches in Harper’s and Putnam’s. One of eight children, seven of them female, born to Charles Jarvis Woolson and Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson (James Fenimore Cooper was her uncle) in the 1830s and 1840s, Constance arrived at adolescence with only a ...”

“... The Casual Vacancy is as much an event as a novel – J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults! – but only the novel aspect can be reviewed. Incidental atmospherics don’t come into it – an astronomer trying to establish the composition of a comet will try to look beyond the streak it makes in the sky. On one level, nothing could be more natural than that a successful writer should try something new ...”

“... Towards the end of A.S. Byatt’s first novel about the Potter family, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the heroine and a clever friend debate the question of whether modern life has rendered some literary forms obsolete. The year is 1953, and the immediate occasion is the staging of a verse drama in the manner of Eliot and Fry; but the debate quickly turns to Frederica Potter’s own hypothetical future as a writer ...”

“... David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten (1999), which describes itself as ‘a novel in nine parts’, is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. The protagonist of one will have a walk-on role in the next; a minor character from someone else’s story will later reappear as the narrator of their own. The first narrator is a member of a Japanese doomsday cult, the perpetrator of a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, now on the run in Okinawa ...”

“... In his moving first novel The Sweet Shop Owner Graham Swift illuminated the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man’s life. Through the succinctly evoked provincial decades one of the engrossing features was the difficulty of love and of communication between generations, even within a family – a problem which threatened, at a local level, the transmission of a sense of history or a justification of the past which Swift so perceptively re-created ...”

“... entertainment diet. The death vigil was known more recently in Britain: think of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, and those crowds in their charcoal overcoats waiting at the prison gate for the gruesome note to be posted. But today, thanks to Twitter, the vigil-keepers and the writers are one. A last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court, a possible reprieve, the ...”

“... In Of the Rights of Persons, the first volume of his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), William Black stone concluded his account of how the law makes a husband and wife one person by suggesting that the legal disappearance of the married Englishwoman was effectively a tribute to her sex. ‘These are the chief legal effects of marriage during the coverture’, Blackstone wrote, ‘upon which we may observe, that even the disabilities, which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit ...”

“... characterisation of the aunt even as she took unexpected charge of the plot, Freeman initiated the first of the quarrels that were to trouble the family both within the narrative and outside it. Howells’s letter to the magazine’s editor, Elizabeth Jordan, has not survived, but according to Jordan, it ‘almost scorched the paper it was written ...”