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“... at Delphi, seekers after knowledge were met by the oracle’s command, ‘Know yourself.’ As Eleanor Cook points out in this original study, riddling illuminates the greatest mysteries through the smallest things. ‘The world presents itself as a riddle,’ she writes. ‘“Here is what I am like,” it says to us. “What am I?” Willy nilly we ...”

“... unanimously enthusiastic about going on with it. Youngest and most ardently political of the trio, Eleanor had a graphic pen for scenes like the funeral demonstration in the East End in 1887, when an omnibus which tried to break through the procession was halted, and a man on it who had been hitting at people with a stick was rough-handled. Her letters are ...”

“... baked pie, ironing board with lace-trimmed mat – is disrupted by the corpse of the industrious cook and laundress lying face up on the floor, a tin of something next to her head. It’s macabre, but compelling: you find yourself scrutinising each tiny thing in the room – the cutesy reindeer-and-foliage-patterned wallpaper, the rolling pin – looking for ...”

“... to her his planned 1941 secret meeting with Churchill off the Atlantic coast, and grieve with Eleanor that she was left in the dark. We live through the tragedy of Missy’s nervous breakdown, stroke and exit from the White House, and disapprove of Roosevelt’s withdrawal from her pain. We wonder whether ...”

“... she was invited to the most glittering receptions. Eight days on the road brought her and her maid Eleanor to Moscow. She was greatly moved to see Matty again – and overwhelmed by the Princess. In Moscow, the lady was regal, ‘in full Star and Garter’; on her estate it was ‘an old brown great coat ... worn to rags is her dress’. ‘She helps the ...”

“... that Morrison would like to have. Each of the women closest to him – L, his friend and the hotel cook; May, his daughter-in-law and dogsbody; Heed, his widow; Christine, his granddaughter – has her own version of the man, and fights to claim him as her own. But we see him chiefly through the eyes of Heed and Christine, who live as enemies in his house. A ...”

“... from the world of purple knees and navy-blue knickers; she had favourites among her students – Eleanor Roosevelt, Beatrice Chamberlain, Dorothy Strachey – and these favourites were presented with a library full of flowers and paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, with select readings in the headmistress’s study and debate with professors at meals. The ...”

“... was far more mundane and far more various. Most servant-keeping households employed only a cook and a maid or a single maid-of-all-work or ‘general’. Domestics frequently worked in their own neighbourhoods; some even sat down to eat with their employers in homes not that different from their own. Family members often worked together. Rather than a ...”

“... longings’ – that the meanings of her stories begin to turn. In ‘The Parrot’, Eleanor, a repressed young paid companion, chases her mistress’s wretched escaped parrot into a garden several houses along, where the arty Lennicotts entertain, to the outrage of their neighbours: the headlamps of the Lennicotts’ visitors’ cars lend ‘an ...”

“... to Rita Skinner, the food at Roedean was ‘one up from prison slop. They employed people to cook who didn’t like cooking and didn’t want to cook.’ At Wycombe Abbey in the 1950s they fried fish on a Friday and then reused the fat to make doughnuts, ‘so the doughnuts tasted of fish.’Snobbery hung powerfully in ...”

“... Noel. (As you might imagine, she stood out from the cast.) Before that, such an inventive woman as Eleanor Bron had to be content with guest status. The lads weren’t going to give up their boas and beads if they could help it. The revues of the early Fifties which featured Jonathan Miller still had their quota of rouged youths. But at long last the IQ level ...”

“... agitation not unlike Tom Mann’s. Harry heard them all – Hyndman, MacLean, Grayson, Wheatley, Cook, Maxton, Bevan, Pollitt – yes, even MacDonald. ‘None of them was a patch on Tom Mann,’ he would say. He described a meeting in Mansfield in which Mann ridiculed the Parliamentary aspirations of the day. ‘He fell on his knees on the front of the ...”

“... broken engagement, though Peggy herself remains entirely oblivious to what is happening. Unlike Eleanor Tilney’s lover in Northanger Abbey, Dane has so far not even left a laundry bill as a token of narrative coherence. Brown assures us that he is a worthy candidate for Peggy’s hand by informing us that he is a good friend of her brother and that he ...”

“... screen version of My Brilliant Career, a triumph for sisterhood and the Australian film industry. Eleanor Witcombe, who wrote the script, had actually known Miles Franklin: ‘She was a very gutsy woman, my God she was. A tough old biddy, but she had a marvellous sense of humour. All those 1890s types were tough ladies.’ Few people had actually read the ...”

“... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...”