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“... memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny brass latch, into which I had put IMPORTANT THINGS: a charm in the form of a watermill whose wheel actually turned, a bright red gobstopper (illegal), a polished stone egg. I was reluctant to let the box go ...”

“... Morocco and France; and while working at the Tate in the 1920s and early 1930s, he and his wife, Helen, had lived in Hampstead, where Braque, Naum Gabo, Diaghilev and Nijinksky were among their many visitors – along with artist friends from closer to home, particularly Ben and Winifred Nicholson. In 1956, the Edes returned to England and Jim started ...”

“... beautiful women’, famous for their height and their healthy good looks; most famous of all was Helen, who was ‘of Sparta’ before she became ‘of Troy’. Aristotle wrote that female excellence was best expressed in beauty, and the materials gathered by Pomeroy suggest that Spartan women were as interested in it as the next woman. The patchy nature of ...”

“... and burghers – the main beneficiaries of the policy – routinely stayed out until the small hours of the morning. In the Ottoman Empire, street lighting wasn’t introduced until the 1840s, first in the Pera district of Istanbul and only later in Istanbul proper and in the other cities of the empire. The discrepancy is of the sort that has long ...”

“... still further by discovering that ‘some years before her death’ Edward Thomas’s ‘widow Helen gave her friend George Thomas open access to all her papers which included some eighteen hundred letters’. Here at last, we are made to think, is the definitive account of one of the century’s most important writers: important for his intrinsic ...”

“... At the beginning and end we hear the voice of her daughter, Pearl. Winnie’s oldest friend, Helen – once Hulan – who followed Winnie to America, has decided (quite mistakenly) that she must soon leave this world, and in order to free herself from the burden of lies, proposes to tell everyone the never-referred-to story of their earlier life. Fear ...”

“... translations that have kept her occupied. The couple have no children. They do have a Mercedes, a small sailing boat, a country house and a brownstone in an up-and-coming neighbourhood – Fox deftly exposes the sordid reality of this estate agent’s cliché. Across the backyard, on ‘the slum street’, the Bentwoods’ neighbours relieve themselves out of ...”

“... a heroic journey out of a return to a middle-aged wife. But women are not incidental to the Iliad. Helen’s abduction has caused the war, and the tussle over Chryseis and Briseis kickstarts the poem’s plot. It is Thetis, Achilles’ mother, who coaxes Zeus to punish the Greeks on her son’s behalf, driving the action of two-thirds of the poem. Aphrodite ...”

“... arrow that pierces his heel. After the funeral, the fall of Troy – which Cook tells mostly from Helen’s point of view. When Yeats wrote, in ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead,’ he was thinking as much of Clytemnestra as of ...”

“... is not there. Dorothy Glover, a woman of formidable selfishness, is dead. She had three children: Helen, resigned to middle-aged unfulfilment; Edward, who has displaced his meek passions into worries about the environment; and the rebellious Louise, the only one who has succeeded in producing a family of her own. It soon becomes clear that Dorothy’s ...”

“... when she was 15. Various men compete for her by running a race, which Odysseus wins by cheating. Helen, already married to Menelaus, is unpleasant about it. ‘I think Odysseus would make a very suitable husband for our little duckie,’ she says. ‘She likes the quiet life . . . She can help him look after his goats. She and Odysseus are two of a ...”

“... disposable wealth was greatly enhanced by the false-spring media and finance boom of the Eighties, small, independent publishers, able to expand thanks to the self-same boom, fall over themselves to plug the gap. Virago Crime, Women’s Press Science Fiction, and a welter of smaller, now failed imprints, were and are a mixture of the odd inspired reprint, a ...”

“... the Edwardian suffrage movement, the two women had reason to celebrate a reform they had played no small part in bringing about. The eyecatching and well-publicised war service performed by British women over the previous four years had slowly recast the suffrage debate. Patriotic displays of civic duty – from making munitions to tilling the land – made ...”

“... New South Wales in 2020-21 was overshadowed by Covid-19. But the plague within the plague was no small matter. Heavy rain after a long drought meant bumper grain crops, which colonies of mice devastated. The use of poison (zinc phosphide coated on wheat and scattered around pastures) had little effect: there were always more mice. Residents suffered no less ...”

“... interruption, distraction and inconsequence. The history of mothering has to be told through small, unfinished stories because hardly anyone before the mid-20th century believed the subject deserved lengthy description. Mothers appeared to stand outside historical time: empires rose and fell while babies napped. Knott addresses her reader ...”