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“... It was a hackneyed truth that while European Christian women in the 18th century were essentially free, ‘“Oriental” and Muslim women were incarcerated body and soul behind veils,’ as Margaret Hunt puts it. Browbeaten British wives accused oppressive husbands of Turkish despotism, drawing attention to the illegitimacy of domestic tyranny in the land of Liberty as well as to their total ignorance of Ottoman Europe ...”

“... Eighteenth-century historians can’t get enough of pleasure gardens. They seem to crystallise the new and distinctive features of Georgian society and culture in one fabulous setting. As places of commerce masquerading as wooded groves, pleasure gardens offered idealised rus in urbe. They could seem poetic in the dusk as the visitor listened to the evening chorus of resident songbirds, but were transportingly magical as night fell and hundreds, if not thousands, of lights were illuminated in the trees and colonnades ...”

“... A voyeuristic pleasure in being privy to secrets drives many archival historians. After ploughing through bundles of faded letters reporting on wills and the weather, pigs and piles, what researcher’s heart would not thrill at the words: ‘Please burn this letter that no mortal eyes may read it’? Manuscripts may seem to offer the pleasures of the peephole but no serious historian would argue that personal manuscripts offer access to unvarnished, unmediated truth ...”

“... who did not fit the norms, social or material, the outcome was often exceedingly uncomfortable. As Amanda Vickery writes in Behind Closed Doors, her sparkling, richly detailed investigation of what she calls the ‘hazy background’ to the Georgian household, ‘cruelty begins at home.’ She looks at many types and conditions of person throughout the ...”

“... been here before. There are echoes of the novels even in some of the characters we encounter in Amanda Vickery’s volume: the clergyman’s wife from a commercial background, for instance, who – very much in the manner of Mrs Elton – addresses her spouse as ‘Mr R’. More important, though, are the similarities in method. Austen claimed to have ...”

“... of fear, and rightly so. In Ottoman lands, as in Western Europe, the evening brought about what Amanda Vickery has called in the English context a ‘frenzy of fortification’: front doors were locked, precious objects were put away and guards placed on duty. In families of all faiths, special prayers were recited, entreating God to protect the ...”

“... indeed, no sooner had gender history’s notion of ‘the rise of separate spheres’ emerged than Amanda Vickery, in a landmark article in Historical Journal, saw it off. Doorstop social histories vanished from students’ bags, and were replaced by the more depressing works of Michel Foucault. But social history never went away, and the destruction of ...”