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“... first baffled by the worship Christians accord to ‘this ugly emaciated man’ ... ‘devoid of majesty, bereft of outward beauty, so wretchedly miserable’. A renegade monk in Mexico (unmissable echoes here of The Power and the Glory) tells him that Christ ‘understands the hearts of the wretched, because His entire life was wretched ... He was not in ...”

“... seeking profit by exposing others to its evil power be reconciled with the decrees of heaven?’ Her Majesty had no reply; but holding the high moral ground did not protect Qing China from the Royal Navy, which sank the Emperor’s fleet of war junks with only one British sailor being grazed by a stray Chinese cannonball, and followed up by blockading ...”

“... had always been, in the female world of home and family. What is new about Robson’s argument is her contention that for many well-to-do men the image of perfect childhood, lost and desired, remained feminine. The image of the girl came to embody a longing for their own primary selves, before the competitive and materialistic values of the Victorian ...”

“... now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and ...”

“... and charting previously unmapped territory. The metaphors of exploration which abound in her own writings are not, therefore, merely rhetorical devices. Thirty years ago Ramon Lull’s philosophical output was a ‘huge un-climbed mountain’ and she was planning ‘a, reconaissance expedition searching out new routes for some future attempt on the ...”

“... seen it all before, the snooping anti-monarchist with the new tie, so she simply passed me to her husband, who asked if a novelist wrote books. As often with the duke, his question lay somewhere between existential brilliance and intergalactic dunce-hood. I merely smiled in imitation of his lovely wife. Prince Philip is a pure catch for a ...”

“... Thomas Odam, do here before God acknowledge and confess that I have grievously offended the divine majesty of almighty God in living incestuously with my wife’s daughter.’ Odam had to repeat this public act of shame on the third Sunday, the first of August, in the loveliest of all English cathedrals, ‘the church of St Andrew in Wells’, ‘wearing in ...”

“... to a big Silicon Valley campaign fundraiser for HRC. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) Yes: Her Herness Herself! A friendly little plush-covered gathering for six hundred at some well-connected Palo Alto dweller’s farcically supersized manse! The next best thing to a private audience with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie ...”

“... not expect to become queen – or ‘female king’ (rex femina) as she was known in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet unborn) children – even his daughters – would stand in line to inherit his kingdoms. He ...”

“... visits to the USA is accompanied by an allusive anecdote about the behaviour towards her of the Iranian Ambassador in Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi. Some visitors to the London Embassy at Princes Gate emerge not only unscathed but even unmentioned. And accompanying the volume as it reached me was a press release (so-called) from the ...”

“... and perhaps then not fully conscious, for it was not an easy period.’ So she wrote in 1977, in her foreword to these memoirs. But the memoirs themselves, written mainly between 1929 and 1939, open on a grimmer note: ‘Only now as I near the end do I remember my childhood without any bitterness.’ The shadow over ...”

“... may be associated with the wrecks of the Armada which, Milton says, ‘larded our seas’. In her meticulously detailed biography of Defoe, which was published in 1989, Paula Backscheider says that at least four of his schoolmates from Morton’s Academy were executed in the wake of the rebellion. They were Kitt Battersby, William Jenkyns and the Hewling ...”

“... nothing but circumstantial evidence. But it satisfied him. Whether or not Lizzie Borden had given her parents forty thwacks, the jury found her not guilty. They were evidently less impressed by the nature of plain circumstantial evidence than Robinson Crusoe had been. Nor is it difficult to see why. The lawyer’s analogy ...”

“... incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also.’ The ‘grotesqueness’ of the Gothic is part of the playfulness Ruskin values. But it cannot be separated from darker impulses: the difficulty … which exists in distinguishing the playful from the terrible grotesque arises out of this ...”

“... Horsfield briskly explores the conflicting attitudes to housework over the last two centuries. Her book introduces us to many attendant ironies – for example, the failure of labour-saving devices to do anything of the sort. It could also be described as a front-line dispatch in the war between men and women. ‘Woman hath much starched up man from his ...”