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“... with politics and little, come to that, to do with crime. The four right-ons under review – two Amanda Crosses, a Sarah Dunant and a Barbara Wilson – have only two murders to rub between them. And neither of the murders which actually happen, and none of the feeble misdemeanours used as plot-devices in murder’s place, have anything to do with money. If ...”

“... really happened to the girl sleuth is that she’s become a woman, the feminist detective of Amanda Cross, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Joan Smith or Sarah Dunant. The crimes are now drugs, rape and murder, but the fantasies are the same: ‘no thugs and smugglers can dwell in their grungy hideouts for long when a girl sleuth is ...”

“... the new Methuen volume includes a marvellous parody of the second act of Private Lives in which Amanda and Elyot’s jagged banter is rewritten for the ‘poorer and less cultured’ Fred and Floss, who retain all of the original’s interactive energy, in considerably fewer words. What is absent from the political plays is that organic relationship between ...”

“... the internet for details: every piece of evidence that came before the court in the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in 2009, and in their successful appeal in 2011, has been scrutinised. Almost everything that has been written about the case has been disputed. It seems unlikely that Knox, a twenty-year-old American student at the University ...”

“... Joan’s own literary work, both as a Gothic novelist and as a poet, memorably epitomised as ‘a cross between Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen’. Extracts from Gothic novels in course of composition pepper the narrative, parodying the genre delightfully but also tracing the author’s growing inability to sublimate her sexual role through fantasies such as ...”

“... posted at 8 a.m. could be delivered by 10). At mid-century, Ralph Allen of Bath introduced the cross posts and provincial post offices (no longer did a letter from York to Shrewsbury have to make a costly trip via London), creating a truly national system. In the 1780s came John Palmer’s high-speed mail coaches: toll gates stood open, fresh horses ...”

“... to keep the party going. The story ends with bitter enlightenment for the young hero. Expecting to cross one threshold of his life, he finds himself at another: ‘he would always remember that something very violent had been done to him and that is when he had begun not to care very much for his brother Magufu ... except that they had the same parents.’ We ...”

“... DIY manga artist, a costume jewellery maker and an organiser for the state’s LGBT Democrats. Amanda Simpson, the US government’s first out transgender appointee, gave the keynote address: a former test pilot, Simpson is now Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Logistics, Acquisition and Technology. I went to watch and to ...”

“... indeed, no sooner had gender history’s notion of ‘the rise of separate spheres’ emerged than Amanda Vickery, in a landmark article in Historical Journal, saw it off. Doorstop social histories vanished from students’ bags, and were replaced by the more depressing works of Michel Foucault. But social history never went away, and the destruction of its ...”

“... Russians, overemotional Italians and amorous, gourmet Frenchmen, while a meticulous Swiss Red Cross official conducts the negotiations with the authorities. For many of them, Coss’s singing conjures up a moment from childhood, a seminal early encounter with art. Hosokawa remembers the first time his father took him to the opera. One of the tragic ...”

“... I might suggest ... oh, never mind. Harvard seems bound to fulfil the prophetic title of the Amanda Cross murder mystery, Death in a Tenured Position, and to prove as true Cross’s implicit contention that anti-feminism among academics is not only destructive but positively lethal. French is very clear on the ...”

“... burgeoning relationship with Harriet Vane. Allingham does the same with Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton, who starts off as a reckless, red-headed tomboy of 17 and ends as the self-possessed Lady Amanda, an aircraft designer and Campion’s wife. Sometimes Marsh refers to cases that weren’t the subject of previous ...”

“... he has been busy working on this book, which started out as a ‘love letter’ to his wife, Amanda – ‘the Bitch of War as she now likes to call herself’ – while he was in jail. Mann’s account doesn’t add much to what we know about the attempted coup; in some respects it tells us less than Adam Roberts’s excellent The Wonga Coup.* Roberts ...”

“... Continent: ‘should you enquire after my Muse, all that I can answer is that I belive she did not cross the channel with me.’ If he had wanted to recharge his Muse, Thomson would have done better to return to Scotland, to travel over the craggy hills where he had early gathered his own immortal honey. But he did not like to go back to Scotland. The Grand ...”

“... in Read. I particularly missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern Protestant ...”