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“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... As readers of her book on The Ladies of Llangollen will know, Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention. Now she has found a new clutch of them in the Archives of the Royal Irish Academy: an Irish countess, a Russian princess, a young woman from Co ...”

“... its report on the morning of 6 July, seven years and 21 days after it was established by Gordon Brown with a remit to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its ...”

“... Elizabeth Prettejohn’s​ book opens with a discussion of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, made in 1852-55 and now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The painting shows a couple leaving England for Australia on a crowded boat. It is insistent in its sharp focus, and brilliant, even strident, in its modern palette: the purple and green of cabbages hanging from the ship’s railing, the bright rose of a windswept silk bonnet ribbon cutting across the centre of the picture, and the mauve fingers of an otherwise concealed infant ...”

“... directly before or afterwards, I don’t remember which. I went shopping supposedly to find a brown jumper to wear with the neat black skirt suit I had packed in my bag from London; the suit I had bought a couple of months before for a wedding, with the idea of looking like Mary Archer. In the event, though, I didn’t find the right ...”

“... here and there with luminous accents. A painting from 1915 shows an angular white jug, a brown-striped teacup and what looks like a packet of butter arranged on a table. A stack of papers overlap at odd angles: a slender, russet-coloured book with a white label; a copy of Der Sturm, the avant-garde German magazine published between 1910 and 1932. The ...”

“... thereafter never again. The sons and daughters of her master became her and her mother’s family. Elizabeth grew to cherish the bond between them and returned to see them after she had gained her freedom and become a successful dressmaker at the White House. Characteristically, she describes these strange loyalties as both reciprocal and ...”

“... My copy of Plats du Jour now gives forth a mellow smell of old paper; the pages are crisp, brown and dry as Melba toast. But it has outlasted the husband for whose pleasure I bought it by some eighteen years, proof positive of the old saw, ‘Kissin’ don’t last, cookin’ do.’ And now it is a historic object, a prototype of the late 20th-century ...”

“... same.) ‘If she took hours choosing the Duchess’s bedtime attire,’ she continues, ‘and her brown-speckled hands lovingly, but critically, fingered hundreds of silk and satin and broderie anglaise items of nightwear, this activity would eat into her working day.’ We have entered into an uncomfortable place, here. It is not inconceivable that Blum ...”

“... it as ‘suffrage work – or women’s work – in another form’ in a letter to her mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the medical pioneer of the mid-Victorian women’s movement.With Murray, a Scottish-born anaesthetist, Anderson established the Women’s Hospital Corps, a mobile medical unit that could be deployed swiftly to northern France, but ...”

“... Virginia Woolf’s. 1924 was the year of Woolf’s ground-breaking essay on ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, which urges the development of new narrative techniques and criticises Arnold Bennett and other Edwardian novelists for doing exactly what Hall does throughout The Unlit Lamp: deduce identity from a description of environment and appearance. Literary ...”

“... bath to wash off the dirt, even though ‘sloughage rolled off her into the bathwater, forming a brown film.’ There are sly references in the book to the question that may be on your mind: ‘Maybe he was hallucinating,’ Finn thinks – but not about Lily herself, just about hearing her say ‘sorry’, something she never does. Before finding her in the ...”

“... Elizabeth was in bed. The dog had its front paws between her breasts, and, its tongue out, it stared at her as she spoke to it. Charles, the husband, undressed and hung his clothes askew on the silent butler. When he took off his underpants, he held them in his hands a moment, expecting his wife to look towards him naked ...”

“... battledress he had cadged off some ex-army student, did so very consciously. But Amis wore his brown tweed jacket and cherry-red polo sweater without giving the impression of having taken any thought about them. He was seeking contributions for Oxford Poetry. As editor he printed long pieces of his own, strangely dithyrambic, almost Swinburnian, and about ...”

“... In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories about the UN (‘the Organisation’) – is written with a mordant, Waughish ...”