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“... its object, unmitigated devotion make the saint a bore. This, I’m afraid, is what happens in Jane Dunn’s book. Ms Dunn has had access to much unpublished material (some now made available by Leaska), and she uses it to fill out a general outline of the sisters’ lives that is already rather well-known – there ...”

“... Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject: I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging ...”

“... of moral Truth she radiates. Exposed to their selves, her intimates begin to wilt.’ So lucky Jane Dunn, who can breathe the less infectious air of a safely dead Antonia, and who ‘now that the dust has settled’ is free to admire her with relatively little danger. And lucky Antonia, who might now escape the legacy of her daughters and their ...”

“... chores were not, and would never be, Freud’s thing. His laundry was done by a friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took ...”

“... system’. But with the world as it is, these advantages may not be as great as they seem. Jane Miller, in a memorable essay on bilingual children in London schools, shows that bilingualism (and in one classroom you can find English-speaking children whose native languages are Egyptian, Greek, Urdu, Tamil, Spanish, Italian, French Creole) is regarded ...”

“... She, too, will find herself ‘occasionally’ reaching for a Pavanne. And the same goes for Carol Dunn, housewife and borough councillor (‘there are nights, though, when Carol will settle down with one of Pavanne’s new novels’), and Jane Forsyth, partner in ‘a rapidly expanding firm of estate agents’ – ‘one of ...”

“... his infatuated English student. Charlotte pined for him. She channelled her yearning into her art. Jane Eyre is the result. These two women, Gwen John and Charlotte Brontë, are the artists to whom I feel most deeply connected. Longing powers my own art.In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David ...”

“... of sex as Hardy’s. Sex is a little personal mystery which may or may not be taking place, as Jane finds when she vainly interrogates Prudence about the exact nature of her relations with her admirer. What we do know is that when poor Prudence is left high and dry she comforts herself by cooking a solitary meal in her flat – a poussin and a salad nicely ...”

“... with a withered right wing and a pumped-up, mutant left. In 2013 a Labour councillor in Grimsby, Jane Bramley, defected to Ukip, saying it was a ‘fairer’ party. At last year’s council elections, Ukip gave Labour a drubbing, reducing it to a minority administration. Yet when Labour needed backing to pass its budget this year, Ukip members lined up ...”

“... down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a ...”