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“... exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly ...”

“... until midnight, it hosted meetings addressed not just by usual suspects such as Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Kenneth Tynan, the publisher John Calder, Doris Lessing, Michael Redgrave and Wolf Mankowitz, but also such distinguished figures as William Empson. ‘Events’ were held in the basement where various tendencies including ‘skiffle, trad ...”

“... An informal Times feature on literary classics, published recently, included a list drawn up by a director of Penguin Classics: ‘The 50 Greatest Classics (pre-1900).’ Such lists can be dispiriting, and it could be said of this one that it had too little Shakespeare and no short poems at all (in such contexts, ‘great’ means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner ...”

“... century, the most revered British veteran of Waterloo was not an ordinary private, but a woman – Barbara Moon – who died in 1903, still able to recall being driven as a four-year-old over the battlefield by her officer father. And when the centenary year approached, Britain came up not with a memorial, but a movie. The director Charles Weston took over ...”

“... of essays on 12th-century Latin, The Tongue of the Fathers (1998), David Townsend and Andrew Taylor confirmed Ong’s insight. Latin discourse, they wrote, ‘endlessly replicates tradition. It upholds a monological and orthodox consensus … To enter into this language is, par excellence, to enter into patriarchy. Medieval Latin, in short, is the Tongue ...”

“... Mush’ – devoted to what turns out to be an only too familiar figure to British readers, Barbara Cartland. Some examples seem to have dropped out on the journey across the Atlantic – architecture, for one, since there is a picture of Philip Johnson, unmatched with any reference in the text – though this can hardly account for the absence of more ...”

“... Foot’s marriage to Jill Craigie. Although Craigie wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea – not Barbara Castle’s, for a start – she was clearly a wonderful partner for Foot, but Morgan can’t stop there: ‘The Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the ...”

“... work with OWAAD and the National Abortion Campaign; Susie Orbach for the Women’s Therapy Centre; Barbara Jones for her work as a woman builder; Sue Lopez for her involvement with women’s football. Around a third of the women were identified as ‘political or intellectual legends’ (sensibly, Jolly doesn’t specify which), and divided into five broad ...”

“... to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary ...”

“... its limiting framework. A case in point is a study that can be read as a pendant to Vogel’s, Jay Taylor’s biography of Chiang Kai-shek, The Generalissimo. In many ways, the starting points are close. Taylor too is a former official, a career diplomat in the intelligence apparatus of the State Department, with postings in ...”

“... of Jane Robinson’s many speculations in this biography is that Dufferin’s satirical target was Barbara Leigh Smith, who had travelled to Algeria in 1856 and engaged herself to an eccentric French doctor of noble lineage, Eugène Bodichon. There’s no evidence for this, and Bodichon, née Smith, was by no means the only wealthy Englishwoman to find love in ...”

“... art collection and the building interact wonderfully well. Three giant bronze beetles, by Wendy Taylor, huddle at the bottom of a spiral staircase, encouraging you to look down at them and take in the perfect curve of the concrete at the same time. A Barbara Hepworth sculpture – Ascending Form (Gloria), on loan from the ...”

“... Most of its 27 biographies originated as book reviews and – in the tradition set by A.J.P. Taylor – they reappear without footnotes or full scholarly apparatus, though with a substantial ‘Select Bibliography’. The newcomer gets double value from a book of this kind, for it combines surveying the abundant recently-published material on ...”

“... sad but compelling tale of MacNeice’s involvement with the Corporation is excellently told by Barbara Coulton. She makes him a hero of tragic stature, intelligent, personable, convivial, saturnine, and disconcertingly hard to know. Her book is a well-composed portrait which itself owes much technically to the radio feature: it is like a patchwork of ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s ...”