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“... Andrew Maunder’s introduction to his new edition of Ellen Wood’s chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations ...”

“... Socialism’, Albert Einstein said, is humanity’s attempt ‘to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development’, and for G.A. Cohen ‘every market … is a system of predation.’ That is the essence of his short but trenchant and elegantly written last book – Cohen died last August. His object is to make what he calls a ‘preliminary’ case – a tentative case that may, in the end, be defeated by inescapable realities – for a socialist alternative ...”

“... utopianism, the biggest speculative bubble in history, neutral, interest-free globalisation. Ellen Meiksins Wood is guilty in her book of glossing over this interregnum and, even more extraordinarily, of paying scant regard to the Cold War: American behaviour and motivation can, for her, be charted as a straight line ...”

“... the hero of this movie and the fiancé we have just seen, says to another woman, the Countess Ellen Olenska, that he wants to get away to a place where social categories like wife and mistress won’t matter, she says to him: ‘Oh, my dear – where is that country? Have you been there?’ And when Archer’s fate is sealed, close to the end of the ...”

“... Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, ‘has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism ...”

“... set on a moor near Pitlochry, the geographical and theatrical centre of Scotland, between Birnam Wood and Dunsinane, so that it is not surprising that the phantom horseman should be Shakespearean in origin. The plausibility of this tale is strengthened by the appearance of real-life people, not too well-known, and likewise Karen Blixen (to whom the book is ...”

“... connecting him efficiently with the worlds of business and finance. His marriage in 1912 to Ellen Farnsworth, ‘the prettiest girl in Boston’, brought him additional Brahmin connections, and their doings in high society were conscientiously chronicled in the quality New York papers. Loomis was also very wealthy. After Harvard, his spell in the ...”

“... new practices as the emergence of the Greek polis from the debris of the Mycenaean palace-kingdom (Ellen Wood), of feudal relations from the involution of late-imperial Roman society (Chris Wickham), of capitalist farming from the unravelling of English manorialism (Robert Brenner) – all innovations of central importance to Runciman’s own account of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anything but money. I am invited to Galveston by some friends, and taken on a windshield tour by Ellen Beasley, co-author with Stephen Fox of an excellent architectural guide to the town, and author of a book on the alleys which run behind the houses, like long, straight, slightly countrified mews. Galveston is a boomtown of the later 19th century, a ...”

“... the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Clean – scrubbing walls, washing curtains – and a lovely woman called Betty and another called Ellen Lawless used to bring me sweets as I sat reading. There was one book in particular, an illustrated Bible that showed angels going up and down a stairway to heaven, and I can still see their white robes as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil ...”

“... war, Fuller married, and after an interval of drink and unemployment, was put in charge of selling wood-fibre bricks designed by his father-in-law. In 1927, having failed at selling them, Fuller, who was then living in Chicago, wandered down to the shore of Lake Michigan and considered drowning himself so that his wife could collect his life insurance. But at ...”

“... 1771 Society of Artists show; by the time she was twelve, she was done with exhibiting. The artist Ellen Sharples had her eight-year-old daughter, Rolinda, read Catrou and Rouillé’s Roman History (a six-volume work, originally in French), then use her imagination to make ‘drawings of particular events’ in the manner of a history painter. At ...”