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“... peremptorily told me to read an article in the New Statesman, ‘The Death of Miss Murrell’ by Judith Cook. Some two days later, since I read the New Statesman and the London Review of Books on trains and aircraft between London and Scotland, I glanced at Mrs Cook’s piece, and was arrested by the following ...”

“... reluctantly and partially. By the same token, if you want only the bad news you turn to, say, Judith Cook and Red Alert, with its unambiguous subtitle, ‘The Worldwide Dangers of Nuclear Power’. Turn to her we shall, in due course: and the news is indeed bad, though perhaps not quite what she intends. ‘Pro-nuclear’ and ‘anti-nuclear’ are ...”

“... society’, like ‘institutional racism’, is an idea too metaphysical by half. Judith Cook’s Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician has a similar title to Barbara Traister’s, reports much the same events, and comes to much the same conclusions if we leave out patriarchal society, but it does so in a narrative ...”

“... is there any reason to suppose that Leon Brittan would behave any better than Michael Heseltine. Judith Cook’s powerfully argued book Who killed Hilda Murrell? makes it clear yet again that the police notion that it was an ‘ordinary burglary’ is simply not ...”

“... this grace by completing his knowledge of self and world, thus returning to Eden by the back door. Judith, Nicholas Mosley’s latest novel, takes Kleist’s essay, with its switchback logic that equates god with puppet, as one of its main sources of meaning. Part of the book is set in an ashram in India (squalid hippy camp or Garden of Eden?) run by a ...”

“... In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s first novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne gets to know her fellow boarders, especially the landlady’s brother, the returned Yank, Mr Madden. They discuss the difference between men and women in Ireland and America. ‘Guys beating their brains out to keep their wives in mink,’ Mr Madden complains ...”

“... the unsurprising movie was ‘based’ on this book. What it is really based on (very loosely) is Judith Thurman’s workmanlike biography of the Baroness, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, which Penguin Books has happily reissued, with a picture of ogling film stars on the cover. Judith Thurman was Associate Producer ...”

“... the Victorian age that it seemed there could be nothing left to write. Nevertheless, after reading Judith Flanders’s Consuming Passions, I’m convinced that Strachey was right – right in his prediction that the history of the Victorian age will never be written. But he was wrong in his diagnosis. The problem is not too much material; it is, rather, too ...”

“... mules for the gear and a spare one for emergencies. We had Miguel, an exceptional guide. We had a cook – his name was pronounced Cecilia. Vicente, his apprentice, was nicknamed Rosie after Rosita de Espinar, la diva del sur, on whom he dotes. Two muleteers hired in Cachora rounded off our team. We all got on cheerfully, even though we knew not a word of the ...”

“... to Rita Skinner, the food at Roedean was ‘one up from prison slop. They employed people to cook who didn’t like cooking and didn’t want to cook.’ At Wycombe Abbey in the 1950s they fried fish on a Friday and then reused the fat to make doughnuts, ‘so the doughnuts tasted of fish.’Snobbery hung powerfully in ...”

“... race an Indian boy. Mary Poppins is, indeed, full of stereotypes: there is a stereotype admiral, cook, gardener, mother and father, a stereotype old lady. One might even say that Mary Poppins herself is the only character of any substance. The Naval and Military Club, the Mothers’ Union or Help the Aged could just as reasonably object to these as a ...”

“... quite serious, a parody of ‘normal’ life. They kept servants and lots of domestic pets and a cook who was, according to one letter, ‘half-savage and very dirty’. Then ‘while we were away, the cook took up painting – proving that art only flourishes in leisure time, I guess ... Hers are getting better and ...”

“... and Democracy’ in his wonderfully measured new collection, Dennis Thompson quotes Judith Shklar, who described the politics of anti-hypocrisy as an ‘unending game of mutual unmasking’, in which everyone is bound to lose. Because democracy is a system of government that institutionalises distrust, as the price we pay for handing over so ...”

“... Red Shoes’ inflicts a cruel comeuppance on exhibitionists and social climbers like himself. Judith Mackrell suspects that Lydia Lopokova was being mischievous when she chose to read ‘The Red Shoes’ on the wireless for the BBC in 1935. Lopokova was a born show-off but she never sold her soul to the dance. She was unusually free of ‘the ...”

“... Discourse; the bits about new kinship systems and older nuclear-family arrangements come from Judith Butler. And here’s another, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a frequent and clearly much loved presence: ‘Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.’ The book begins with the ...”