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“... Antonia Byatt’s new novel opens with a lecture and a window. Phineas G. Nanson, listening to an exposition of Lacan’s theory of morcellement, looks up at the window and decides to quit academe. He thinks: ‘I must have things. I know a dirty window is an ancient, well-worn trope for intellectual dissatisfaction and scholarly blindness. The thing is, that the thing was also there ...”

“... At​ the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, Dr Manette is ‘recalled to life’. His death was figurative – he had been held in the Bastille for 18 years by lettre de cachet. The king’s sealed letter, authorising the detention of a man or woman without trial for an indeterminate period of time, was one of the Ancien Régime’s most reviled mechanisms ...”

“... The most ardent revolutionists and those most wrought upon by hatred and regicidal passions were not able to pass the tower of the Temple when the Terror was at its height, without experiencing certain qualms.’ Baron Arthur Léon Imbert de Saint Amand began his late 19th-century biography of Marie-Thérèse from a place of desolation. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Madame Royale, later Duchesse d’Angoulême was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the sister of the dauphin, Louis-Charles ...”

“... the past. Out of the scattered scraps that Aubrey left behind, and with some additions of her own, Ruth Scurr has built the diary that Aubrey never quite wrote. Scurr assembles a somewhat Pepysian, first-person Aubrey – paradoxically, given Aubrey’s evasive presence in his own biographical and antiquarian writings ...”

“... his vision was defective. Even with the help of spectacles, he didn’t see very well, and was, Ruth Scurr suggests, both short-sighted and long-sighted. His perspectives were strange; the lines between himself and the outside world were blurred. Diffident, rather gauche, he should have kept himself apart from the world; instead, he seems to merge ...”