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“... Pascoe has put it, ‘the purest imaginable’, something so unpolluted it can nurture human life. Thomas Raynalde, writing five centuries ago, agreed: in his Womans Booke he states that menstrual blood is ‘pure and holsum’. Perhaps if we were to reclaim some of this pre-modern terminology we might be able to change our relationship to menstrual blood.If ...”

“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... got the idea of Mrs Malaprop from his mother’s play A Journey to Bath, using the bare bones of Frances Sheridan’s Mrs Tryfort to create a character who exemplifies ‘what happens when the proper use of language is neglected’. Mrs Malaprop is ‘at one and the same time an example of bad language and a pedant’, demanding attention to propriety and ...”

“... words like glooby and glubbed. Something similar if less intellectually demanding can be found in Frances Molloy’s novel No Mate for the Magpie, which is written in dialect and follows its heroine from babyhood through convent to civil rights marches. The unfamiliar words are few (wheen, wain, sheoghe – the last, ‘changeling’, beautifully applied to ...”

“... it flourished in the United States well into the 1920s. In 1891 the eminent British surgeon, Thomas Spencer Wells, expressed his outrage at this state of affairs in images which no contemporary feminist could have bettered. He denounced the ‘gynaecological proletarians’ who performed ovariotomies on unscientific and frivolous grounds: ‘If we hold ...”

“... Frances Soundy​ lived in Battersea. She had several children and a husband who periodically disappeared. Off and on, throughout the 1820s, she wrote to the church wardens and overseers of the parish of Pangbourne in Berkshire asking for money. One son needed shoes, another clothes; the rent was due; debts had mounted ...”

“... as James suggested. They set up an 80-foot maypole, topped by deer antlers. A lawyer called Thomas Morton became the local Lord of Misrule. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, viewed this revival of the ancient Bacchanalia with horror. Armed men arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and the maypole was chopped down the following ...”

“... The Children’s Book, Philip Warren is walking on Romney Marsh, towards his favourite church, St Thomas Becket. He ‘knew little about Thomas Becket’, Byatt writes, ‘and did not know that the church was built on Becket lands’. Philip made his way from tuft to tuft of the marsh grass, for it was sodden underfoot and ...”

“... the complete subordination of one person’s interests to the greater interests of others. As Frances Kamm has emphasised, such an inviolable status is denied to everyone by any consequentialist system, whatever outcomes it values.The question I am asking is whether, looking at ourselves from outside, we should come to view our attachment to rights and ...”

“... project was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to ...”

“... to this? Early on, Howe focuses on the key figure of Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in St Thomas in the West Indies in 1832 but lived much of his life in Sierra Leone. Even before the European Scramble for Africa, Blyden formulated the essential problem faced by people of African descent. Should they argue that they are identical with Europeans but ...”

“... unequal bargain? Well, early in 1913, when Lloyd George was the chancellor making the proposal, Frances Stevenson, the daughter of a Scottish accountant and his part-French, part-Italian wife, did so. I can see why. It isn’t just that I’ve always had a soft spot for Lloyd George, who was a flesh and blood human being, and not one of those ...”

“... given a supply of paper and allowed to write poetry rather than make lampshades; the nurse, Frances Meacham, preserved his manuscripts in a bin in her garage. Like those of Dickinson, stored for decades in a barn in Amherst, they too would eventually make their unlikely way into an archive, being acquired, after the Velvet Revolution, by the Museum of ...”

“... sense, is unlike them in cleaving to the convention of literary tourism exemplified by Dickens, Frances Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson and dozens of other British writers, for whom democratic, republican America presented an appalling and comic spectacle of unruly manners and institutions. For these, too, were out-and-back narratives: the place from which ...”

“... photographer, ‘a little, ugly, underbred-looking thing’; the talkative Misses Eden, Emily and Frances, are old and ugly and stink like polecats. There is a long tedious dinner at the Babington Macaulays, but the host escapes personal comment. Children exasperate Miss Fane; she would not wish her sleep disturbed by ‘a fat maggot’ at her side. A ...”