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“... mice from overrunning their homes. Then there were the corpses to dispose of – and the smell.In Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, a group of nuns in the Australian outback are initially reluctant to kill mice: their credo is ‘do no harm.’ The unnamed narrator is reluctant too: she used to work at an endangered species rescue centre, and thinks it ...”

“... for a monster, and frightened by his aspect, he immediately fled. Towards evening, he entered a wood, weary and tired he sat down at the foot of a tree, he opened his little packet, ate his supper, and went to bed. Waking with the lark he felt his limbs numbed by the cold, his hard bed hurt him; then he remembered his father, the ingrate recalled the care ...”

“... closed eyesof my heritage    along with the utteranceof ‘your ration’or carved from crimean wood    ornateas a goldfinch    used to separatenewborns from motherswhen a knife is deemed too violento babusi    i have gathered you here as spoonsyou are what keeps the dead feedingBabusya’s Armsremember the winter i fumbled my thumbunder the knife ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows 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 participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”

“... soap opera and boulevard farce. For instance on 5 June 1808, the 41-year-old Constant married Charlotte von Hardenberg (her second marriage had been annulled, his first had ended in divorce), but married her secretly, then took extraordinary precautions to prevent anyone knowing he was married, living apart and visiting ...”

“... Charlotte Smith was the first English novelist to make a castle or great house into an emblem of the state. Before her, houses in novels provided appropriate settings or confined rebellious heroines: Smith introduced the house as a microcosm of the condition of England and a site for the subtlest display of an author’s political loyalties ...”

“... goes to another part of the palace and listens as if she had never left. It’s a pleasure to see Charlotte Rampling in this role in the new film, although ‘see’ is not quite the word. We hear her through a veil that is more like a mask, but we could not mistake her for anyone else. She brings a special relish to her first task, which is to torture (after ...”

“... Ilearned​ only recently, from Charlotte Chandler’s biography, that Bette Davis had taken her first name from a Balzac novel, not knowing, apparently, that the character in question was ‘rather a bitch’. All too appropriate, we might think, since Davis referred to the people she played in movies as ‘all those bitches I had to take everywhere with me ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... slippage. I felt something similar about Cantet’s previous movie, Heading South, in which Charlotte Rampling leads, in no uncertain terms, a group of North American women looking for (and paying for) sexual pleasure in Duvalier’s Haiti. The women get less and less casual about their casual affairs, and one of their young men is killed for a reason ...”

“... his younger brother spent their days gathering lumps of coal, iron rivets, bits of copper, canvas, wood, stretches of rope, and even floating hunks of fat. Today’s mudlarks have to apply for a permit from the Port of London, costing £40, and must report any items more than three hundred years old to the Museum of London.It is chastening to think of what has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... around a more or less inclusive ‘us’. One such group, a group of two, Herbert Bellamy and Charlotte Springall, amused each other during the year before their marriage in 1891 by making a quilt loaded with in-jokes and fond mementos: another barrage destined to baffle. Britain’s so-called ‘liberal’ artists parted company with their artisan ...”

“... a drawer for three decades. ‘We haven’t had such a good transfer in years,’ he said later.) Wood GalleryThe current retrospective at Tate Britain (until 24 October) shows – in its scale, its curatorial arc and its popularity – what should never have been in doubt: Rego’s unending ideas, her technical gifts, the fierceness of her intentions, her ...”

“... increasingly coming up with paradoxical comparisons for dustjackets: ‘Brighton Rock written by Charlotte Brontë’; ‘the Camus of the backpacking generation’. Not all ladies have become women. In a chapter here on P.D. James, Martin Priestman records her distrust of ambitious professional women, approval of loyal housekeepers and disdain for people ...”