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“... and powers served by the proliferation of hermeneutic techniques’. Jerome McGann and Olivia Smith are two good critics, both Americans publishing in England, who fall in with Mitchell’s injunction to ‘historicise’. Each regards a work of the past as both an individual literary performance and an event occurring in space and time. They think of ...”

“... with a young family, died of a brain tumour in 1937. Manning’s husband from 1939, R.D. (Reggie) Smith, a British Council teacher and later an academic and BBC radio producer, drank a lot and was a compulsive, if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which ...”

“... way she’d chosen to live. In 1992, Lucca herself had been instructed by X to discourage Theodore Smith, an interested biographer. ‘Her life will not become a historical object,’ Lucca says during a meeting with him in a café. ‘Only her work will remain.’ But when X dies unexpectedly four years later, Smith sells ...”

“... they face. While in Wives of Fame Edna Healey claims that Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin ‘deserve to be brought out of the shadows’, she ensures by her choice of title that our interest is aroused precisely through their famous husbands. Peters, with refreshing frankness, entitles his book Red Jenny: A Life with Karl Marx, thus ...”

“... his and dark dwelling eyes’. While the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear or Stevie Smith is always immediately identifiable, de la Mare’s rhymes often seem both to aim at and to achieve the anonymity of a skipping song. The opening rhyme of Peacock Pie is a good example:I heard a horseman      Ride over the hill;The moon shone ...”

“... set-pieces: their crucial role in her characters’ lives can be disclosed by passing reference. Emma is full of food, though scarcely a dish is described – apart from the egg whose soft boiling so perfectly delineates the character of Mr Woodhouse. We know exactly how Mrs Elton would have behaved at the grocer’s and how Mr Knightley would have carved a ...”

“... speculates in a similar vein about the later and sunnier correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s teasingly ...”

“... George was a travelling salesman selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres & Smith turned their production over to military headgear. He persisted nevertheless, setting off day after day, decade ...”

“... implicitly endorsed. (Sponsored by the Central News Agency, South Africa’s equivalent of W.H. Smith, the prize was at the time the white establishment’s most important literary award. In the Heart of the Country also won the anti-CNA Mofolo Plomer Prize founded by Ravan Press, the progressive, anti-apartheid publisher that gave Coetzee his first ...”

“... Owen, Hooker and so on – and all his talk was of science. Even in his loving letters to his wife Emma (‘my dear Mammy’), science is always on his mind. ‘What a very good girl you are to write to me such very nice letters, telling me all I like to hear,’ he tells her in 1848, ‘though you have not mentioned the 2 new Azaleas.’ And: ‘you were ...”

“... devoted to her in the most gentle and chivalrous manner. Quite why she married ‘Luddy’ Ogden Smith remains something of a mystery, but he was a good friend, kind and sophisticated, who must have been a reassurance and who made no demands on her. When she obtained a Mexican divorce it was widely supposed she wanted to remarry. But she preferred men as ...”

“... feel that both found greater comfort and pleasure – more of that ‘heartfelt felicity’ that Emma Woodhouse finds with Mr Knightley, or Elizabeth Bennet with the handsome Darcy – in remaining with one another. The letters from Austen that Cassandra allowed to survive testify to such a primordial bond. Virginia Woolf observed of Austen’s fiction that ...”

“... aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”

“... Cushman not only had a public partnership with Hays and, after her, with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, but a long secret affair with a young woman who married her adopted son, thus becoming her daughter-in-law. This ‘matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household’, as Sharon Marcus describes it in Between Women, was ...”

“... Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. Orwell discounts Jack the Ripper as an altogether special artisan of murder, but of the remaining eight, six were poisoners. The perfect murderer, he explains, was one who would satisfy the requirements of the reader ...”