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“... odd pieces of narrative embroidery? Such questions may help to explain the unsatisfactoriness of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s recent novels. Or simpler explanations may be more pertinent: waning energy, for example, and the loss, or abandonment, of her real – her serious – subject. Polish-born, English-educated, married to an Indian, and living, at least ...”

“... Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access public library generates.’ When he jumped over the counter, as it were, things were rather different though father’s footsteps come into this too: it you can’t be a gauleiter being a ...”

“... me.’ Radclyffe Hall has long since been left behind, along with Joan Ogden, the heroine of her first novel, The Unlit Lamp, and the character to whom these words refer. The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were ‘aggressively intelligent ... not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who ...”

“... footnote to the opening phrase ‘we, as feminists’ confesses to hesitating over the use of the first person plural because it is ‘under interrogation’ in this book. ‘I want, however, to align myself with feminists and with feminism from the beginning,’ the note continues, ‘so that I might combat from inside the notion that this might be an ...”

“... at the Siamese ruler. The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), Anna Leonowens’s first book about her years in Siam, dryly alluded to ‘his Excellency’s private Utah’, but neither that book nor The Romance of the Harem (1872), which has been reprinted by the University of Virginia Press, seems especially troubled by the practice of ...”

“... Ned did well enough at school to be allowed to study classics, and his classmates became his first real friends. He was attracted to religious ceremony, and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman or even joining a monastic brotherhood. The spiritual intensity of his Oxford phase and ...”

“... intent on showing that his sister-in-law had been wrong to believe herself fatally ill when she first felt the effects of her tumour in 1839, the conviction that she was about to die seems to have struck the patient herself as distinctly liberating. Life in the Sick-Room, the book that she wrote while believing herself to be dying of her uterine ...”

“... and DeMille’s biography recount the dreadful arrival of what Graham calls the dancer’s ‘first death’, the end of the physical ability to keep dancing. When she collapsed and was taken to hospital, her public thought she would die, and some doubtless thought she should. Her performances were becoming limited and her behaviour embarrassing, and ...”

“... one in our own – if only because ‘in’ the family was hardly a figure of speech. Until the First World War, the event almost invariably took place at home. And until the later decades of the century, Jalland argues, it typically took place in a climate of religious belief that made all the difference not only to the dying but to those left ...”

“... opinion of Heaney, Longley, Muldoon etc.) Poetry-watchers will already be familiar with Paulin’s first collection, A State of Justice (1977). The Strange Museum marks, as they say, an interesting development. The poems here are less self-contained, more resonant and suggestive, than those earlier ones. Paulin, moreover, now speaks with a distinct personal ...”

“... the preservation of law and order. Hooper wonders if this ‘moderation’ represents the ‘first frostings of middle age’. Nearly all of them are still in their thirties. Then there is Sam Stein, another liberal lawyer. He has been trained by his wife into expressing anti-patriotic opinions: he is expected to assume that whenever British troops make ...”

“... discovered in the vestry of a Paddington church. This is a splendid opening for a detective novel. Ruth Rendell likewise, under her new name of Barbara Vine, kicks off in striking style: ‘On the morning Vera died I woke up very early.’ Vera Hillyard, we learn within a line or two, is scheduled to die by hanging at the usual hour of eight in the morning. It ...”

“... of 1879. James was usually a shrewd critic, but ‘charming’ is hardly the adjective that first leaps to mind when the modern reader confronts ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’, say, or The Marble Faun. Especially since the Second World War, most 20th-century commentators have preferred to echo Melville’s celebrated remarks on his contemporary’s ...”

“... will all do the same I suppose; Their days of subserviency now will be past, For all will speak first, as they always did last! Though this ballad went on to predict the end of wifely obedience when the royal bride declined to ‘obey’, Victoria did in fact take the vow when she married Albert in 1840. But no matter what she promised at the altar, a ...”

“... traced these circles than she characteristically complicates the picture. On issues like the first Reform Bill, the two groups were sharply opposed, yet both ‘belonged to a new middle-class intelligentsia who repudiated aristocratic privilege and wanted change’, and both conceived of themselves – if avant la lettre – as avant garde: in fact they ...”