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“... is no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole anthology without ever confronting the idea that sexuality has been a vexatious political issue in Irish history. Even Terence Brown’s introduction to the useful ...”

“... Rebecca West died 17 years ago at 90, in a comfortable flat overlooking Hyde Park. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, to her amusement and gratification. Will she be remembered more as a character, thoroughly damely and commanding, or for her writings? Eleven novels, of no outstanding literary merit; nine other books on general subjects, of which the most admired (and especially relevant today) is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on Yugoslavia; a mass of articles on the public affairs of her time ...”

“... in 1922, he got too drunk to appear on the stage. Worse followed. In October 1924, driving through Hyde Park, he ran into a man, was arrested and, though trying rather wildly to bribe the police, was charged with being drunk in charge of a motor-car and sentenced to a month in Pentonville jail. Oddly, what seems not to have come out in the trial was that, at ...”

“... appearance in each place and be cheered to the echo. A warm tone of ovation sounds throughout Mary Soames’s stately, proprietorial edition of her parents’ correspondence – the authoritative ties of blood are stressed emphatically on the cover. It is a remarkable manuscript archive, used extensively by Gilbert, but only now available to us in ...”

“... was none the wiser. There was nothing to report, so I gladly accepted the invitation of James and Mary Hanratty to join the wake for their son in their council house in Kingsbury. The Hanrattys were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend ...”

“... term ‘metaphysical’). But Amis is less concerned with reconstituting the mysterious past of Mary Lamb (as she arbitrarily calls herself) than with exploiting her as a centre of deranged consciousness. For Mary the common world is defamiliarised. Thus, for instance, she tackles the telephone: ...”

“... the hotel all afternoon until the detectives arrived, either at 6.30, according to H. Montgomery Hyde, or ‘between 7 and 8 o’clock’, according to Hesketh Pearson. Hyde argues that Wilde ‘could not make up his mind what to do, until it was made up for him by the force of events’. Pearson evasively maintains that ...”

“... and a degree of psychological melodrama belonging in the tradition of Scott. The outlines of Mary Robinson’s story are to be found in de Quincey’s Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets and in the 1805 Prelude, where Wordsworth notes that it had quickly become one of the lurid entertainments of the London stage. In fact, it was Coleridge who had ...”

“... first sighting of Virginia, standing with Vanessa at a garden party at the Stephens’ house at Hyde Park Gate, both sisters beautiful, ‘dressed in white muslin, with grass-green ribands round their waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir ...”

“... finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know – we had our talk alone two years ago – that I think this girl both ...”

“... illegitimate children before his marriage. The year Oscar was born his father began an affair with Mary Travers, the daughter of a colleague. She was also his patient. When Sir William tried to end the relationship, Travers claimed that it had begun while she was under anaesthetic. She wrote angry letters to the Wildes and published a pamphlet about a girl ...”

“... right hand didn’t care to know what the left got up to. Do we have here a case of Jekyll/Hyde? Certainly the nimble Carroll seems endowed with a personality greatly at odds with that of the decorous Dodgson. And, unfortunately, after The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Dodgson succeeded in quelling his impulse towards entertaining irreverence. He also ...”

“... Walter Besant’s novel The Revolt of Man (1882); and of anti-male writing by female authors – Mary Cholmondeley’s futuristic play Votes for Men (1909) is one example – which used the device of role reversal to create a world in which women were the queen bees and men the drones. We are treated to the kinds of literature and art which attempted to ...”

“... closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the menu, in which boiled fish and rice pudding loomed large.If Johnson ...”

“... the suit I had bought a couple of months before for a wedding, with the idea of looking like Mary Archer. In the event, though, I didn’t find the right brown jumper; I forget, come funeral day, what I actually wore. But I did get a nice skirt in Top Shop, brown tweed with crooked pleats. I did get a useful smock top, thin but cosy, nicely draped. Both ...”