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“... for a buried self, relate to a person who presents herself directly, without a mask? First and Scott record the events and emotions of Schreiner’s life with minute fidelity, but the living, brilliant-eyed woman escapes yet another attempt to pin her down. Her openness remains too disconcerting; her positions, which defy categorisation, seem to these ...”

“... to settle for long in one place. Her restlessness meant, as her biographers Ruth First and Ann Scott point out, that she ‘lacked a constituency’. In spite of her record of friendships, she felt the pain of isolation, both personal and political. ‘Indeed the two were joined, for her sense of politics included the necessity for the individual ...”

“... global ambitions and enticed the hopeful young. One of them was a girl from Seattle called Ann Dunham, who became Barack’s wife and the president’s mother. Her father Stanley was restless and ineffectual, a furniture salesman full of big plans and bad jokes; her mother Madelyn was ambitious and competent, a bank vice president whose favourite ...”

“... was forced out of the ministry for trading and promptly went bankrupt. As Ruth First and Ann Scott tell us in their 1980 biography of Schreiner, this catastrophe ‘scattered the children and marked the end of the family home’. It seems, on the face of it, as noteworthy as the maternal spanking. The Companion is similarly silent about ...”

“... and the author’s disquisitions, these ‘distancing’ devices. We might skip them, like Walter Scott’s footnotes, and pursue the thread of the story through the Q.-and-A. pattern, governed by the persistent investigator. He is a lawyer called Ayscough, sceptical, devious and sometimes choleric (or feigning to be so) and he works for a client whom he ...”

“... is of a tousle-haired, clean-limbed and smiling John Spahr, looking like a tragic hero out of Scott Fitzgerald. Why does one of the very best scholastic rowers in the United States go to school in North Philadelphia – when he lives in Cherry Hill? ‘It was just word of mouth,’ said John Spahr, who won the Junior National Singles championship last ...”

“... First, sort out your Scotts. George Gilbert Scott (1811-78), hereafter Sir Gilbert, designed the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office and the tumultuous cliff of a hotel that shields St Pancras Station. A spiteful ditty, summing up the Victorian business of church restoration, also accounted him first among ‘the earnest band that spoiled half the churches in the land ...”

“... in a single programme called ‘Nine Eyes’. A strong proponent of this project is C (Andrew Scott, who wouldn’t look out of place in Cameron’s cabinet), who is intent on merging MI5 and MI6, and a Spectre mole. Shuttering the double-0 programme and retiring Bond are on C’s agenda: 007 is obsolete in the age of drones and wiretaps. This is the ...”

“... Véra Nabokov​ , Nora Joyce, Ann Malamud, Vivien Eliot – the list of literary victim-wives is long, but none commands as much attention as Zelda Fitzgerald. Recent years have treated her husband unkindly, or maybe truthfully, exposing more drinking and more affairs, but decades after Zelda’s death in a North Carolina asylum, her cult is teeming with new acolytes ...”

“... she could dance at a club called Ritzy Ray’s. That might have been the place she met Colonel Scott, a small-time local con artist who made his dimes collecting tolls from drivers crossing a free bridge. When Kathleen got pregnant, Scott told her he’d been summoned away on military business. In fact, he was a civilian ...”

“... it might indeed make good 20th-century sense to worship food, but punters of ‘foodism’ (as Ann Barr and Paul Levy jokily dub this phenomenon) are evidently not about to drop to their knees because they are starving.‘Foodies’, according to Barr and Levy, are ‘children of the consumer boom’ who consider ‘food to be an art, on a level with ...”

“... addressed to his son the letter of ‘crowning importance’ upon which the Epilogue closes. But Ann Thwaite, in her admirable biography, produces something definite: Gosse wrote a long reply to this letter on 19 January 1870, three years after he left home to take up his employment in the Museum. Significantly, perhaps, the reply has a good deal to say ...”

“... Ann Douglas’s The Feminisation of American Culture, first published in 1977, now appears in Britain at the same moment as its long-delayed successor, Terrible Honesty. Looking back at the earlier book, Douglas remarks that her ‘excavation and re-evaluation of American feminine 19th-century literature’ has been continued by many other historians, mostly women, who have rebelled against what she calls, in tones more civil than those of some of her successors, a literary canon consisting ‘of almost exclusively male-authored, conspicuously shaped and achieved works ...”

“... an intense desire to get Barbie into an elevator – quite common, apparently. The otherwise mousy Ann used to paint nipples on her and rub them off, over and over, when the parents were out. Barbie turned someone’s sister into an alien: ‘Now she’s just like her. She’s materialistic. And now her daughters are into Barbie.’ A sub-section called ...”

“... direct or indirect sustenance in Macpherson’s poems: Burns’s visionary ‘duans’; Walter Scott’s ‘translations’ of ‘Highland Minstrelsy’ in Waverley; Fenimore Cooper’s translatorese standing in for Native American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian ...”