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“... overshadowed by chalk escarpments, about four miles from Stonehenge. One of my ancestors, Charles Light, was the pastor of the Zion Chapel, a Baptist church there, in the second half of the 19th century. Charles’s younger brother, Henry, was also a Baptist minister, preaching in Chitterne, the next village. His son, another Henry, my father’s ...”

“... shuffling off items into Raphael’s study, replacing them with wine glasses to reflect the light. The coin stayed where it was. I met Raphael in 1985 when I was thirty and he was fifty. I was in my first academic job as a polytechnic lecturer and working on a doctorate. ‘Raphael Samuel’ was a name on a book spine – People’s History and ...”

“... It’s four years since my husband, the historian and socialist Raphael Samuel, died of cancer at the age of 61. In the weeks after his death, I wrote about him every day. I filled a boxfile and an A3 ringbinder with anecdotes and observations, physical descriptions and characteristic phrases; I made notes on what he had told me of his childhood, on our marriage, on his work, on what we called his ‘Communist unconscious’; I even listed his shirts ...”

“... Fortitude Cottage in Old Portsmouth, so the publicity tells me, is named after HMS Fortitude, a 74-gun ‘ship of the line’ that was part of the fleet which took on the French in the Napoleonic Wars. A tall bow-fronted house, it’s a bed and breakfast done out ‘boutique-style’, with white duvets, chocolate suede furnishings and modern ceramics ...”

“... The​ vast majority of those who worked in service never set foot in a stately home. The country house, with its uniformed staff and rigid hierarchy, looms large in the British imagination, but the experience of service in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was far more mundane and far more various. Most servant-keeping households employed only a cook and a maid or a single maid-of-all-work or ‘general ...”

“... Lampy​ , just a couple of inches tall, is the last of his tribe, and is now immured in a glass cabinet a long way from his German homeland. He was one of the porcelain Gnomen-Figuren brought to Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire in the 1840s to populate the huge rockery, fissured with crevices and ravines, which Sir Charles Isham created in front of his bedroom window ...”

“... bed, she told the journalist, there were strange happenings. A tumbler spontaneously shattered, a light bulb from the bedside lamp migrated, still hot and intact, to the other side of the room; a pot of face cream, flying through the air, narrowly missed Don, their son, who was coming to their aid, and their lodger, George, was hit by coins (a shilling and a ...”

“... According to Baudelaire, fervent lovers and austere scholars have one thing in common, especially in their riper years. They share a love of household cats, who, like them, are ‘sédentaires’ and ‘frileux’ – sensitive to draughts. Baudelaire wrote many hymns to the friend of sensuality and learning, but it was another hundred years before cats reached their current popularity as pets ...”

“... He’ – ‘someone slightly overpowering who dances divinely’ – she wishes she were ‘light and amusing and attractive’ (she is podgy, shy and often tongue-tied). Pratt writes her journal in the holidays from boarding school, ‘that strangely bittersweet prison’. She begins by breathlessly totting up her past ‘beaux’, who include a waiter ...”

“... whose ignorant, savage tribes, like those elsewhere in the British Empire, needed the clarifying light of Christian missionaries or exposure to scientific reason.The maps were imaginative artefacts as much as scientific documents. In the new folio they have been ‘re-curated’, as the cover blurb puts it, with just a hint of the coffee-table book. The maps ...”

“... In November 1913, ‘the Headingly two’, a dark-haired woman of about twenty-five and ‘a girlish figure in green cap and sports jacket’, stood trial for attempting to set fire to a football stand in Leeds. Among the evidence produced against them were some postcards, one declaring ‘No Vote, No Sport, No Peace – Fire, Destruction, Devastation’ and another addressed to Asquith: ‘We are burning for “Votes for Women” ...”

“... Book of Gay Short Stories). Her gay men ironise femininity, break the rules of decorum and make light of deep feeling. Mervyn Cantrell, the caustic and gossipy librarian who lives at home with his mother, shamelessly lusts after Ianthe Broome’s Pembroke table in An Unsuitable Attachment; Ned, an American whose voice whines like a gnat, manipulates the ...”

“... journalist thought her less a flaming phoenix than a delicate hummingbird). Tiny, fast and feather light, with a leap almost as high as Nijinsky’s, at 18 she was the latest sensation of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star. Mackrell is astute about Lopokova’s handling of her early celebrity and her ...”

“... In the 1960s we used to sing a music-hall song in the pub whose rousing refrain began, ‘Two lovely black eyes – Oh, what a surprise!’ and went on: ‘Only for tellin’ a man he was wrong – two lovely black eyes!’ It took me a while to realise that the singer was a woman who’d been beaten up by her bloke because the song made me laugh so much, especially when we all whooped in chorus on the ‘Oh’, raising our eyebrows melodramatically ...”

“... traffic between them. In choosing to write the history of an English family – her own family – Alison Light makes a determined if somewhat uneasy effort to bridge this gap. Painfully aware of the hazards, she tries repeatedly to disarm the criticism, or self-criticism, that is an inevitable consequence of her project. Is the turn to family history ...”