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“... that when it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War she was ‘rather pleased’. Linda Lear suggests, plausibly, that the grimness of Potter’s childhood was exaggerated by her earlier biographers. Certainly it was materially comfortable but it was strikingly austere. The older Potters were affectionate in their way but their social ...”

“... a dramatic event, and the conflicts and crises it involved form the climax of the second half of Linda Lear’s excellent biography. One revelation is Carson’s fear that she would be sued. The chemical companies got wind of the book long before publication and, seeing the risk to their hugely profitable government contracts, tried some ...”

“... to appear and the largest volume of all, is the work of the general editor, Janet Todd, and of Linda Bree of the Cambridge University Press, which long ago set a standard for editing novelists with its multi-volumed D.H. Lawrence. The extent and minuteness of the labours of Todd and Bree, both in this volume and throughout the series, are almost painful to ...”

“... a woman’s tongue being a kind of penis, linked with her sensuality – was, for Jacobeans, Lear’s great moral mistake in the love trial. Presumably Don Pedro, who has just half-jestingly proposed marriage to Beatrice, and been tactfully refused, can congratulate himself on escaping disaster, despite having committed ...”

“... to describe the making of English culture as a national possession. In this respect he supplements Linda Colley’s compelling account of the forming of political and imperial nationhood in Britons (1992), which had room for Hogarth but not for Shakespeare, who was made into one of the nation’s guardian spirits during the 18th century. Brewer shows how ...”

“... I found that reading the Penguin edition was like going to a new production of Hamlet or Lear: memory stumbles, because bits are missing, dialogue is transposed, and scenes turn up in different places. Leaving out the story of ‘Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri Banou’, for example, without a word of explanation, means that we lose the flying ...”

“... more or less influenced manners in England.’ Yet co-existing with this French influence was what Linda Colley has called a ‘vast superstructure of prejudice’, directed generally against Catholics, but particularly Catholics of the French persuasion. ‘It should flatter us,’ wrote the French novelist Fougeret de Montbron in 1757. ‘Every foreigner in ...”

“... is Piltdown Man (supp. fl. four million BC, ‘archaeological hoax’). Then comes Leir or Lear (supp. fl. c.820 BC, ‘king of Britain’), followed by several other equally doubtful types whose inclusion prompts the thought that although subjects must be dead to merit inclusion, there is no equally stringent requirement about having lived in the ...”