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“... at the heart’ of this biography of Queen Mary. What steaming titbit can her fellow American, Anne Edwards, biographer of film stars, have turned up at this late hour? Can it really be that rather overworked rumour that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can. James Pope-Hennessy did not find room to ...”

“... watch the snow falling into Maria Vetsera’s open grave. The snow falls at Astopovo too, where Anne Edwards sets her prologue and shows us Countess Tolstoy outside the stationmaster’s hut, trying to catch a glimpse of her dying husband through the curtained windows. Astopovo is probably better documented than Mayerling, a secret trysting-place where ...”

“... that of Inspector Lestrade in six Sherlock Holmes films during the Forties. One of the virtues of Anne Edwards’s book is that she gives in a footnote a potted biography of every actor and actress she mentions. These notes have great period interest, as well as commending themselves to film buffs. The Depression was on when Jane Eyre was produced, and ...”

“... From Anne Edwards’s biography of Margaret Mitchell, we know that Peggy Mitchell had ‘sailor-blue eyes’. We also know that she stood four feet eight, which is mighty small for the militant author of Gone with the Wind. At this size she mounted, or climbed up a ladder to, a large horse. Wheeling him (fervently: her whole life was led in adverbs) and crying ‘Look at me!’ to the South in general, she fell off ...”

“... popular biography of Thackeray we have had in the last nine years, taking its place alongside Anne Monsarrat’s Thackeray: Uneasy Victorian (1980) and Margaret Forster’s sprightly ‘autobiography’, Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (1978). (Rather meanly, Peters leaves both competitors out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three ...”

“... traiterous and wicked designs … and also craftily designed to reproach and scandalise [Queen Anne’s] wise and faithful ministry, divide her councils, create variances, disputes and discords in her parliament, and to raise and foment animosities, fears and jealousies amongst all her people’. A reprint was swiftly issued to replace incinerated ...”

“... through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife (here ...”

“... the devil’. In the years following there was a flood of accusations. When in May 1649 Sarah Edwards’s cow produced multicoloured milk, she and her husband were convinced that it had been bewitched by Hugh Parsons, the brickmaker whose wife, Mary, had been fined for accusing Marshfield. In February 1651 George Langton, a carpenter, declined to sell hay ...”

“... and her mother’s world which Henry’s first annulment crisis represented. Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was equal to Katherine in stubbornness and her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her own and was not afraid ...”

“... Pâtisserie Viennoise. Then back to boulevard Voltaire. Judy still ill, cannot face reception chez Anne Wade-Minkowski, rue de Rivoli. I go with Jean-Claude. Adonis, Yves Bonnefoy, François-Xavier Jaujard and Paul le Jaloux already there. After an hour’s talk, champagne, quiche, sight of copious buffet in neighbouring room gives me nausea. I lie on sofa ...”

“... ability. Lauretta Ngcobo (a contemporary South African novelist) has as much in common with Anne Bradstreet as with Athol Fugard – if not more. And Anne Bradstreet has as much in common with Ifeoma Okoye (a Nigerian writer of children’s stories) as with Cotton Mather, or more. Riding alongside is the assumption ...”

“... was important for him: it was here in June 1927 that he met his lifelong partner Hilton Edwards. They became Ireland’s most famous homosexual couple. I remember, on Micheàl’s 70th birthday in 1969, watching them being treated as such on Irish television. When he died in 1978, MacLiammóir’s funeral was attended by the President, the ...”

“... the genitalia and disguising ‘signs of arousal, incontinence and menstruation’, as Nina Edwards writes in The Virtues of Underwear (Reaktion, £20). Because of its proximity to intimate areas, sites of shame or transgression, it comes with heavy cultural baggage. In Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, the sight of the Pardoner’s trousers is ...”

“... my father’s precepts?’ ‘Never easy’ is a euphemism. Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy and Anne Edwards’s recent one of Countess Tolstoy show life at Yasnaya Polyana to have been hellish: perpetual rows between the two factions – the husband’s and the wife’s – tantrums, periods of non-speak, hysteria, walk-outs, suicidal gestures. As a ...”

“... of his private experience. Little can be gleaned about his marriages to the wealthy Londoner Anne Carleill, who died childless just two years after they married in 1564, and then in 1566 to the widow Ursula Worseley, with whom he had two children. His sole surviving daughter, Frances, married the poet and Protestant courtier Sir Philip Sidney. Cooper ...”