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“... her own name? One reason is that it has never been quite clear what it was. She began life as Mary Anne Evans, daughter of Robert Evans, a sturdy and prosperous land agent in Warwickshire. But Mary Anne sounds rather like a servant’s name (the White Rabbit’s housemaid is called Mary Ann). As the rising fortunes of the ...”

“... it is the colour of writer’s block. I look out the window and at the keyboard and try to avoid a Barton Fink. What is the difference between a pattern and a story, I wonder, as paragraphs repeat and strain for change, like the unsuccessful mutation zigzagging the walls; flowers held monstrous in stasis, trying to stop being flowers and start just being ...”

“... pursue Like Rats that ravyn down their proper Bane, A thirsty evill, and when we drinke, we die. Anne Barton has remarked, slightly bitterly, that ‘much of the action takes place in a prison’: and certainly the shadow of bars is all a workable set really requires. The prison is a real place, city-like, full of all the ‘great doers of our ...”

“... had to learn to turn a smiling face on their fading personal idyll. In 1527, the bombshell fell. Anne Boleyn, a pert young Frenchified Norfolk girl, trained to royal service in Brussels and Paris, had returned to England in 1521 and become a notable presence at the English court. Her married sister, Mary, was already one of Henry’s mistresses. He now fell ...”

“... was no longer, though, the sort of influence Henry wished for his daughter. After his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth, Mary was sent to join the household of the infant princess. There, she was surrounded by connections of the Boleyn queen. Margaret was superfluous; curtly, Henry wrote her off as a fool. If he had trusted ...”

“... now. People were scoffing chicken liver pâté with walnuts and knocking back Château Langoa-Barton at £22.50 a bottle. They were not hushed. Their boisterous gold-card voices rang out over the tables, and they talked in the new slang of space and computers. ‘We have lift-off on the Swanley deal ... ’ ‘I find the Volvo pretty user-friendly ...”

“... to her ‘proper station’ as an earl’s daughter. A comparison with, say, Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton reveals the slenderness of real social concern in Fanny Burney’s novels. It is only possible to see her as a ‘Jacobin’ by ignoring the evidence of her journals and letters, in which she does indeed show humanitarian concern for individual ...”

“... the man and the nature of his faith is his weeping for joy on hearing the prophecy of Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, that if Henry were to marry Anne, he would not remain king for long. Once Fisher and More and a handful of public opponents had been crushed, Henry proceded to dissolve the monasteries, and to attack ...”

“... capacity for everything from paternalism to gross error. As Sir Henry Brooke (a judge) and Anthony Barton (a doctor and solicitor) point out in their chapter on consent to treatment, the stance adopted by any legal system at any point of time represents a choice, spoken or unspoken, between paternalism and consumerism. But while they rightly suggest that most ...”

“... is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the disappearance of Mary’s aunt Esther, who has fallen in love with an army officer and become pregnant by him. When the officer disappears and their daughter falls ill, Esther ...”

“... He lists his profession as ‘sculptor’. I could discover, too, that he had married Mary Anne Beirne two years earlier, and that they now had a baby son, also called John. Mary Anne was the eldest daughter of the local butcher, who was the Beegans’ neighbour on Dunlo Hill. Beegan married up; the Beirne family ...”