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“... Mothers​ have a hard time in Ali Smith’s novels. I mean that Smith gives them a hard time, as well as acknowledging the hard time they’ve had already, just getting this far, in one piece. In Summer, the final novel of Smith’s seasons quartet, the harried mother is Grace ...”

“... that put the issue back on the agenda in Wales. During his brief time as Labour leader, John Smith tasked Davies with drawing up plans for devolution in Wales. Smith was a true believer, unlike Tony Blair. But Blair inherited fully formed plans for devolution in Scotland and Wales when he became leader in 1994, and ...”

“... most illustrious of royal houses, used to governing an unlikely combination of polyglot subjects. Charlotte was the beautiful and ambitious daughter of the most successful off-the-peg monarch, Leopold I of the Belgians, who had shown since 1831 how ersatz German royalty could offer a new and shaky state stability, dignity, neutrality and valuable ...”

“... which is Christopher Hibbert’s two-volume study published nearly thirty years ago. The late E.A. Smith, who sadly died between the writing and the publication of this biography, thought that all previous studies were ‘to some degree superficial, and most follow the view that George IV was a dissolute, pleasure-loving dilettante and a feeble, ineffective ...”

“... years later he and his wife Elizabeth left England for Nauvoo, Illinois. There he built Joseph Smith a temple that was not quite completed when the prophet was shot dead by a mob. Another mob burned down Miles’s temple, and he fled Nauvoo with his family. Hounded by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped ...”

“... and Lady Mount Cashell, Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it was to be ...”

“... score who depended on each other’s society, but apart from stylised Utopias and parodies, like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, there are no explorations of the topic, although one should add, thinking of the role of dramatic confidantes – that it was a part of life too much taken for granted for the new novel to interest itself in ...”

“... pleased with itself. What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen that their readers (perhaps particularly the male ones) only notice it in terms of their own feeling of gratified response to what seems a subtlety of fellow-feeling, a gratifyingly tacit appeal to their own ...”

“... In 1852, Elizabeth Barrett Browning met the expatriate American actress Charlotte Cushman (famous for her trouser roles) and her companion Matilda Hays, a writer and feminist. They had ‘made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other – they live together, dress alike,’ Barrett Browning wrote to her sister ...”

“... especially important for women writers. Emily Brontë was in her own way a self-dramatiser, Charlotte a self-esteemer. Her example was easier to follow, much more influential. When Aurora Leigh was published in 1857, reviewers pointed out a striking resemblance to much in the plot of Jane Eyre. Romney Leigh, her cousin, whom the half-English ...”

“... was some heated dispute, when Mrs Gaskell’s biography was published, over the authenticity of Charlotte Brontë’s harrowing depiction of the scene of her childhood suffering. Jane Eyre’s Lowood School was, Charlotte claimed, ‘true’ and ‘photographed’ from the reality of the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan ...”

“... appearance), and left one wondering how they had managed to stay together so long. Dick Heckstall-Smith defines a band as ‘a passengerless collective’, but he doesn’t say ‘driverless’, and his often rivetingly interesting book, which deals largely with the breakup of bands, frequently demonstrates that conflict is bound to occur between a collective ...”

“... The​ evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith believed that his former supervisor J.B.S. Haldane ‘wasn’t an ordinary mortal’. Haldane moved between the fields of physiology, biochemistry, genetics and evolutionary biology, making contributions to each that would ‘satisfy half a dozen ordinary mortals’, and also wrote scientific articles and books aimed at non-specialists ...”

“... No one with even the most cursory interest in the subject will learn much from Sally Bedell Smith’s Prince Charles, which relies heavily on Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of 1994, but her plod through the material builds into a detailed, sometimes affecting picture of Charles and of the curious concoction of fantasy, celebrity and tradition that is ...”

“... from 1660 – this is omitting foreign authors, pseudonymous characters like ‘Captain Alexander Smith’, and others whose masculinity may be nominal. It would be rash to expect all these to qualify for Spender’s epithet ‘good’. But if Ann Emelinda Skinn and M. Peddle (two of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is not ...”