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“... and know all the unpretending common-sense answers. The enlightened upper-middle class, in fact. Ann Thwaite points out that the tyrannically aristocratic Sir Brian Botany, in Now we are six, is humiliated by his social inferiors, and comforted after his discomfiture by finding his right level as ‘plain Mr Botany, B’. The strange thing about the ...”

“... is one of the little things those novelists are so good at conveying. The most absorbing aspect of Ann Thwaite’s altogether fascinating study is not so much Emily Tennyson herself, effortlessly adoring and self-sacrificing wife of the great man, but the undercurrents and cross-currents revealed by the author’s use of minute factualities, and by the ...”

“... as a record of educational and religious conditions which, having passed away, will not return’. Ann Thwaite’s 1984 biography of Edmund Gosse was already sceptical about such claims, but what had been a small skirmish in that book is the central campaign here. Fortunately, the Gosse family were inveterate letter-writers and journal-keepers, and not ...”

“... addressed to his son the letter of ‘crowning importance’ upon which the Epilogue closes. But Ann Thwaite, in her admirable biography, produces something definite: Gosse wrote a long reply to this letter on 19 January 1870, three years after he left home to take up his employment in the Museum. Significantly, perhaps, the reply has a good deal to say ...”

“... to jump the editorial immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their titles suggest, geography is equally crucial to the trade war pitting Longman against Norton. Given the inevitable overlap between their contents, it may be all that allows some harried buyers to ...”