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“... night of a play called Late Love. It was a hit, and the party was fun. That’s where Dunne met Ellen Beatrix Griffin, ‘Lenny’. Her father was rich from cattle in Arizona, but the Griffin family was richer still: they had made most of the railroad wheels in the US. He asked Lenny to marry him, and she did. She was dropped from the Social Register ...”

“... a letter exculpating her husband as the only good thing in her life.’ Bernard then married Ellen Day, the snobbish daughter of ‘a fashionable London dentist’. Their children grew up in a big house in Hove while Bernard slept off hangovers in his London chambers, spent time with his French mistress and did a spot of writing. His first novel, The ...”

“... of conquest. Anyone who could not appear in person could always be conjured in paint or plaster, wood or wax. Julius Caesar, in his triumph of 46 BC, had treated the gawping crowds to a series of pictures of the last moments of his rivals in civil war: Cato disembowelling himself ‘like a wild beast’, Scipio throwing himself into the sea, Petreius ...”

“... but all its numbered pages are intact. The paper is machine made, of linen and cotton fibres, not wood pulp, and has blue guidelines to write on; the pen that touched this paper was a goose quill, and the pigment was acidic iron-gall ink, which leaves faint mirror-writing on the facing page, fluorescing traces like a ghost of the text. The handwriting is ...”

“... London merchant family, she was sent away as a child to a wealthy and charitable spinster, Ellen Marryat, the sister of the famous novelist. Miss Marryat’s strongly Evangelical household not only imparted a strenuous sense of calling, but also a rigorous education When as a 16-year-old Annie returned home, it was with strong Anglo-Catholic ...”

“... articles and ads touting the childless – make that ‘childfree’ – life. Today, books like Ellen Peck’s The Baby Trap (1971) seem as dated as bell-bottoms and go-go boots (‘a Minnesota lawyer I know, married for ten years with no children, “dates” his wife; they live together in a fun-fun lifestyle that is close to that typified in Playboy ...”

“... he stood,         The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,         And burbled as it came! So the Jabberwock finds him – and not when he’s actively seeking it. Maybe his thought breathed life into the creature; the boy needed a demon to conquer so he helped to invent one. This possibility sheds light ...”

“... the worse of him for it: ‘So much perfection,’ she said, ‘argues rottenness somewhere.’ Ellen Wilkinson was more amusing: ‘The trouble with Oswald Mosley is that he is too good-looking ... He is not the kind of hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture but the one who hisses “at last we meet.”’ In the general election at the end of ...”

“... recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in that of ...”

“... no CD player at my mother’s: she’s still got – believe it or not – the same wacky fake-wood-grained cabinet-style phonograph we had in the Buena Vista apartments in the 1960s. It has spindly metal legs and space-age styling and looks like something the Eameses might have designed on a not-so-good day. Granted, I can get all weepy and nostalgic just ...”