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“... books to be preserved, Orwell added, he would ‘certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them’.Hester Grant’s The Twitnam Summer is an account of the six months between March and August 1726 when Swift travelled from Dublin to London to finish Gulliver’s Travels, spending part of this period at Alexander Pope’s villa in Twickenham ...”

“... In the DNB Hester Lynch Piozzi (as they call her) is identified as a ‘writer’, but for the past two centuries she has been a heroine of old and new-fashioned marriage plots and a source of critical controversy. A brilliant conversationalist and an innovative recorder of her own life, she was dull only on the subject of her genealogy: her parents (who were cousins) were descended from Catrin of Berain, Mam Cymru (‘Mother of Wales ...”

“... it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ In a letter of 1955 to Betty Hester (the correspondent known simply as ‘A’ in the 1979 edition of O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being), O’Connor recorded the great impact on her as an adolescent of ‘The Humorous Tales of E.A. Poe’, by which she meant Volume VIII of the 1904 ...”

“... no accident that two substantial biographies should appear within a year of each other, along with Hester Davenport’s account of Burney’s five hellish years at Court, as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte. They join several other biographies on the library shelf. It is worth asking – as Harman and Chisholm, for all their virtues, do not ...”

“... in microcosm. The story of their friendship contains within it a much larger history and, as James Grant shows, both story and history were shaped by the seismic events that refashioned Britain’s place in the world during the second half of the 18th century. The title of Grant’s joint biography, Friends until the ...”

“... characters: the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hedda Gabler and Hester Prynne (hence ‘Xavier’). Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that characterised her treatment of Simone de Beauvoir’s The ...”

“... less than £200,000 over more than a decade; the Conservatives’ biggest recent donor, Frank Hester, gave more than £15 million in the year and a half leading up to the 2024 election. Marshall didn’t need to be more generous: his wealth and his patronage of CentreForum were enough to grant him access and ...”

“... story, so when Clarisse tries to rape him with a view to having his baby, he backs off furiously. Hester Prynne, Clarissa, Tess, Anna Karenina – life is indifferent to class when it comes to trapping us in stories. Still, as Tess complains to her mother, ‘ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these ...”