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“... him to think like other people!’ Percy Florence was unusual in a uniformly cerebral family. Charlotte Gordon’s premise for writing a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is that while their lives overlapped only for ten days, they shared a spirit. Wollstonecraft’s work – especially her treatise on education and A Vindication ...”

“... Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the ...”

“... When Charlotte Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also made clear that her habit of day-dreaming threatened to unfit her for the ‘ordinary uses’ of the world ...”

“... During her lifetime Charlotte Mew was either greatly liked or greatly disliked, and now, more than fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are at least two collections of her papers which nobody is given permission to see – not quite with the feeling that she ought to be left to rest in peace, but, rather, that she shouldn’t be shared indiscriminately with outsiders ...”

“... by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. In the event, however, she wrote a biography of Charlotte Mew, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which was published, and reviewed in the LRB in 1984 – and will be reissued this summer.In 1927 Charlotte Mew was 58 and living with her sister ...”

“... expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early ...”

“... most illustrious of royal houses, used to governing an unlikely combination of polyglot subjects. Charlotte was the beautiful and ambitious daughter of the most successful off-the-peg monarch, Leopold I of the Belgians, who had shown since 1831 how ersatz German royalty could offer a new and shaky state stability, dignity, neutrality and valuable ...”

“... Cumming was giving evidence in the libel suit brought against her grandmother, Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, by the two schoolmistresses. Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie claimed that, acting on the word of her granddaughter, Dame Helen had brought about the ruin of their school and their reputations: she had withdrawn Jane Cumming from the school and caused the ...”

“... by Swift, Pope, Gray, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Blake, Burns, Shelley, Lamb, Charlotte Brontë and Dickens. Amis is hardly the only 20th-century writer represented here: the Library has significant Modernist holdings (Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens – none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and ...”

“... it? Sixty years after Punch ran the poem, Knox’s daughter, Penelope Fitzgerald, published Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print and there are no ...”

“... Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the august company of the Humes and Priestleys. Worthington figures briefly in the DNB and Williams’s Eminent Welshmen, but is not a household name even among historians of Georgian ideas. John ...”

“... talents and no orthodoxy except an un-Oxfordian devotion to Russell. The department, housed in Gordon Square, became famous, not least because of the Professor’s furious lifestyle. London offered everything: in Gordon Square a stream of celebrated visiting speakers and perpetual high-level discussion; in nearby ...”

“... Maynard was working very hard, travelling between London and Geneva; he had installed her at 50 Gordon Square, where Vanessa Bell was also living, terribly disturbed by Lydia’s entrechats upstairs. For Lydia the necessary thing was to hold on to Maynard, who was prepared to take responsibility for her financial affairs. ‘Maynard’ she writes, ‘you ...”

“... in the valuations of Scottish Power and Stagecoach. The once-booming finance sector, centred on Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, now boils down to the Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Life, the latter now landed with the pensions crisis. The prospect of a decent rail system is retreating to the 2020s, some of the necessary cash having been blown on five ...”

“... its shrill theme is “failed promise”, if not outright “tragedy”.’ In contrast, Charlotte Margolis Goodman’s Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart is a respectful literary biography written from a feminist perspective, which draws extensively on Stafford’s unpublished novels and stories in the University of Colorado. Goodman sets Stafford’s ...”