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“... had little talent for levity. So the jokes are crucial. One occasionally gets the impression, from Mary Lovell’s compelling, fluent and problematically sucker-uppy biography, that she isn’t always entirely sure whether the jokes are funny or not: she quotes the tried-and-tested ones over and over and leaves out the new ones thrown up by Nancy ...”

“... of this terrible hour a neat middle-aged woman stopped at the foot of Mam’s bed. ‘It’s Mary, love. I’m off now. They’ve just rung me a taxi.’ She turned to me: ‘Could you just go and see if it’s come.’ I went out into the entrance hall, cheered that one of these desperate women could by a stay in such unpromising surroundings be ...”

“... Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him. Undeterred, Godwin determined to introduce himself to ‘the author of ...”

“... paint the same subject over and over, so that her portraits become, as the painter and critic Mary Taubman put it, like a ‘distillation of self’, so powerfully do they evoke her own presence. When she followed her brother Augustus to the Slade in 1895, she joined a group of talented young women, which included Ida Nettleship, Ursula Tyrwhitt, Edna ...”

“... Manchester when, arguing honestly for a new assistant lecturer, I was annihilated by Sir Bernard Lovell, who claimed that if he didn’t get the money I was asking for he would have to close down the Jodrell Bank telescopes. Empson at least had the experience of infighting in BBC committees. In my shoes he would not have been intimidated by Sir Bernard, but ...”