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“... published in the early Sixties, another full-length study might need some justification. But Anne Taylor has compressed Besant’s inordinately eventful ‘lives’ into a managable book half the size of Nethercot and pulled the threads together into a single life. Both contemporaries and earlier biographers tended to divide Besant’s career into ...”

“... world was as it had been in the beginning. For most, that meant America. Harmony, the subject of Anne Taylor’s excellent book, founded first by the Württemberg religious reformer George Rapp, and purchased in 1825 by the most celebrated of the new utopians, Robert Owen, whose ‘Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation’, where inequality, private ...”

“... behave as women, paints a picture of their role very similar to that in the writings of Jane and Anne Taylor, Congregationalist in faith. Young girls, Charlotte Yonge thought, should not be able to reserve any time for their own private occupations, except that on Sunday afternoons they should be able to prepare for the Sunday school which they would ...”

“... room; religion was not to be discussed. So I was barely aware of these girls’ beliefs, until Anne Guenther arrived. Anne was a bright, good-natured woman, and I took to her immediately. I’d like to think that she also liked me, that something in my 11-year-old self attracted her apart from my spiritual ...”

“... intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the reader who is reading straight ...”

“... a second time, when a woman in the congregation forbade them. The poor girl, whose name was Anne Stevenson, declared that about three years ago she had a child by him, and that he had many times promised her marriage ..., and that he had kept her company so lately as Michaelmas last, and farther that she would be glad to be married to him at any ...”

“... love without cause and obey without reason is amazing.’ The respectable and redoubtable Marthae Taylor wrote in 1736 to a suitor rejecting his offer of marriage, which she interprets as ‘the desire of being absolute master’ of herself and her fortune: ‘What? Shall I bribe high to enslave myself? Resign all and then cringe to my master’s purse for a ...”

“... last time that someone would come to grief after offending Parsons. Eighteen months on, Jonathan Taylor claimed to have been attacked in bed by three demonic snakes. He, too, suspected that this was the work of Parsons. Then Taylor started to have ‘fits’. Other accusers came forward. William Branch, a ...”

“... of Florence, who inherited a full share of the Smith resolve), he met a young milliner, Anne Longden. She was the daughter of a local miller, far beneath him in fortune and rank. He made her his mistress, and Barbara Leigh Smith was the first of the five children she bore him. He did not marry Anne. The more ...”

“... women in his memoirs. Then again, doing so might have caused no end of trouble. He married Lily Anne Richardson in 1905, when he was 27 and she was 23; they’d met at one of the firms he worked for, where she was employed as a stenographer. In his memoirs she’s referred to only as L.A. and though he pays tribute to her as a helper – ‘She typed my ...”

“... corner is lit by the bright sunlight of an Israeli spring. This other world is the world of Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams, a novel in which Yehuda and Naomi Kaminka would have been temperamentally much more at home. Like Yehoshua, Phillips shares out much of the responsibility for telling the story between her main characters. However, the narratives ...”

“... Anne Serre​ was ten when her mother died in 1971. She claims to have no memory of the preceding years. ‘My father sank into a depression,’ she told the White Review in 2020, ‘and my sisters and I … tried with all our might – like all children in this type of situation, I think – to protect him, resuscitate him ...”

“... a painted-over figure, presumably a self-portrait. The order is thought to be, from left to right, Anne, Emily, Charlotte. Hassall compiled her scene from different sources: Patrick’s profile, with his distinctive high neckerchief (worn, we are told, because of his fear of bronchitis), was copied from a photograph taken late in his life, when all his ...”

“... enjoying an agreeable intimacy with the formidable Leslie Stephen and his charming sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray. In 1874, when Far from the Madding Crowd came out, he became famous, and shortly afterwards was hobnobbing with most of the intellectual leaders of the day, and a surpringly large number of the social notabilities as well. But Hardy, who had a ...”

“... of Trevelyan’s historical writings over fifty years – Wycliffe, Garibaldi, the Stuarts, Queen Anne, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Grey of Falloden and above all the English Social History – not merely to recount the story of Trevelyan’s career, but to defend all aspects of his philosophy, style and historical method. In so doing, Cannadine plunges ...”