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“... different from the one around them. In a bold-faced piece of bohemianism, the utopianists of Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which ...”

“... seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime ...”

“... fighter? It depends on who is telling the story. Robin is, in many ways, conservative: he worships Mary (but opposes the corrupt church) and reveres the king (but hates the corrupt nobility). His loathing of certain churchmen comes not from anti-clericalism but from piety: he goes to Mass at peril of his life, but in Martin Parker’s 1632 ballad, ‘A True ...”

“... husband, the eye surgeon Sir William Wilde, had been over-attentive to an unbalanced young woman, Mary Travers, who sued Lady Wilde for libel. Had Sir William violated the girl under chloroform? All Dublin speculated. Lady Wilde stood by her husband, but would have done better, we are told, to break down in the witness-box rather than display indifference ...”

“... his eloquence, wit and rakishness; he had figured in the greatest civil trial of his times, the ‘Douglas Cause’ over the rightful inheritance of one of Scotland’s most powerful dynasties. But there remained something amateurish about his approach to the law. Boswell worked hard enough on his briefs, but, as his colleagues felt, he took everything too ...”

“... also the pre-election campaign which he conducted in order to steal the initiative from Sir Alec Douglas Home, who declined to go to the country until the last moment. And I came to like him a great deal. When he retired on 16 March 1976, I felt as if his presence had filled the best years of my life. It was like the death of an estranged father. In those ...”

“... various feminisms staked out by Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, Carolee Schneemann and Mary Kelly. Buchloh’s discussions of German photography from August Sander to Andreas Gursky are fascinating, and he pays welcome heed to Valie Export and Martha Rosler. It is also Buchloh who presides over the authors’ shared reflection on another recurring ...”

“... their mother took them with her on a trip to Italy, following in the footsteps of Norman Douglas and accompanied by her admirer and mentor Irving Davis. When Davis’s stepdaughter joined them she objected to the children’s presence and so unworried was Gray about them that she gave them £20 and told them to hitchhike back to London. It took them ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... Hunt her Booke not his’. Another woman wrote in her copy of The English Midwife Enlarged: ‘Mary Hillyer her book/god give her grace ther/unto look not to look but/to understand larn [learning] is beter/then house or land.’ The woodcut birth figures in these books were not images drawn from observation – pregnant cadavers for anatomical drawing were ...”

“... The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”

“... Tanganyika, but ‘proved that East Africa was a woman’s country too’. She was followed by Mary Hall, who insisted on being called ‘Miss’, and emulated Grogan’s Cape-to-Cairo safari. She had taken up travel for her health years before and was now in her late forties. Without servants or companion, scantly guarded by two askaris, but employing ...”

“... to function in the Thirties; it was in Garrick Yard and had been Chippendale’s workshop and when Douglas Byng first used the stable for a night-club in the Twenties Chippendale’s lathe was still hanging from a beam. All Motley’s costumes were stored there and when it was blitzed early in the war John G. came down the morning after and found nothing ...”

“... wholly or partly biographical, such as Frank MacShane’s of 1965, and various memoirs such as Douglas Goldring’s South Lodge, you have to agree that Ford the man has been capable of sustaining interest. The record as to his work is not quite so impressive; of his eighty-odd books not many are read, except for The Good Soldier and the tetralogy ...”

“... bringing down their prey with the minimum of charge in the exactest area. We see them demolish the Douglas Building in downtown Omaha: rough brick side-walls and grandiose corniced and pilastered street façades. One set of charges weakens the building, a second set brings it down. Each victim looks indescribably obsolete in its last erect moments; yet the ...”