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“... it may well also be the last, it’s fortunate that she has fallen into the sympathetic hands of Annie Gray. Gray is a food historian and she sets Landemare’s long life in the context of changes in diet and eating habits over nearly a century. The story that unfolds against this background takes us from her ...”

“... it annoyed her even more that they were wrong about the attic. The mad wife in Jane Eyre, Dorian Gray’s portrait, and herself: all were thought to be locked away in an attic, and not one of them was . . . Charlotte Brontë was quite specific about where Bertha (Alice sometimes thought of Mrs Rochester by just her Christian name, as if she knew her ...”

“... for free speech which came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The march set out from Clerkenwell Green, Annie Besant and Shaw being among the many who carried banners. Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx and the other leftist intellectuals remained for the duration of the demo, which was interrupted not merely by the police but also by ...”

“... Little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue An’ the lampwick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo, An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray, An’ the lightning-bugs in dew is all squenched away – You better mind yer parents and yer teachers fond and dear An’ cherish them ’at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear, An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ’at clusters all about Er the Gobble-uns’ll git you, ef you don’t watch out! James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote the above embarrassing and disgusting verse, was, of course, voicing what was, in the 19th century, considered a very proper and creditable sentiment ...”

“... broken body is rescued by an eccentric recluse. She turns out to be a homicidal and crazy nurse, Annie Wilkes, who before retiring under something of a professional cloud killed 20 of her patients. But she is a devoted – not to say fanatical – fan of Sheldon’s bodice-ripper heroine, Misery Chastain. Unluckily, Sheldon has just killed off Misery, so as ...”

“... in English goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... they protest? Why don’t they insist on erecting a cunt, in memory of – I don’t know – Annie Oakley, Marilyn Monroe, the witches of Salem?’ A little of this goes a long way; but D.M. Thomas goes from length to length. The Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe play no further part in Swallow. Another familiar mask is borrowed from American politics, to ...”

“... other, more canonical late 19th and early 20th-century novels by gay men. Wilde’s Dorian Gray, for example, with its progression from innocence to corruption, and symbol of the unadmitted life. Certainly Forster’s Maurice, which begins with its hero at the troubled age of fourteen and ends (happily for once) with his escape with his lover. À la ...”

“... her cervix to set off uterine contractions, and now she has to wait. We are on the first page of Annie Ernaux’s first novel, Les Armoires vides, and we are going to have to wait with her. In pregnancy, quickening refers to the first movements of the foetus in the womb, but here we are waiting for a death, and as we turn the pages of the novel and get ...”