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“... Years ago​ , a poison pen letter dropped onto my doormat. It was a rambling affair in uneven capitals, accusing me of all sorts of lurid wickedness. As no threats were involved and the allegations were evidently crazy, I put it straight in the bin and tried to forget about it. But I was unsettled. Who had written it? How had they found my address? Why me? Was worse to follow? Nothing else happened, but for a long time I was careful about locking doors and windows at night, and faintly uneasy when out walking alone ...”

“... What fills our lives? We can’t manage without the grand abstractions of belief or love, but in the end they mostly come down to the engrossing triviality of our daily routines. What we usually do is keep things going. True for everyone: but especially true, or so it has seemed, for women. The really basic questions – what we are to eat today, what will happen to the children – have always been for women to answer ...”

“... Growing up means leaving a family behind, and the novel has built itself around the diversity of separations that make maturity happen. It follows that any prospect of a universal rebellion against the family would be bad news for fiction. You can’t leave parents behind if they were no more than discredited ghosts in the first place. It’s tempting to suspect that an erosion of patriarchal authority had made today’s novelists more anxious about the staying power of the family than they used to be ...”

“... Much of the literature of the 19th century grew out of sibling relationships. Tennyson’s first publication was a family project, with contributions from three brothers. The Brontës’ fiction emerged from the closed world of Haworth parsonage. Harriet Martineau’s writing was shaped by complicated feelings for her brother James. The work of the Rossetti family is among the most conspicuous examples of this pattern ...”

“... Aren’t you tired​ of them? One hears nothing else nowadays.’ The peevish Mrs Snowdon, a character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’ (1887), is grumbling about the popularity of ghost stories. Nevertheless, she is gripped by the one that follows. Accounts of the supernatural proliferated in the 19th century, as the certainties of orthodox religion were undermined and the hard realities of industry and commerce became increasingly oppressive ...”

“... so, too, does the interest in mythology which became so important in his later writings. Dinah Birch provides this in her admirable study, Ruskin’s Myths. In addition to charting his changing attitude to Greek art and literature more fully than anyone has ever done before, she offers a most revealing examination of his attitudes to Greek myths ...”

“... the leader of a gang of shoplifters (when finally caught, he was sentenced to 12 strokes of the birch). After working for an ironmonger and as an apprentice picture-framer, he spent six months in Bristol, squandering his earnings on drink. He had dreams of sailing to the US but his grandmother, now a widow, wouldn’t hear of it. Then she died, and her ...”