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“... with modern technology that may allow the redacted passages to be recovered. The introduction to Jane Potter’s excellent new edition of the correspondence carefully assesses the damage done by his brother and presents a fine summation of the contexts and interest of the letters themselves. She includes most of those written after Owen joined the ...”

“... How amusing Aunt Harriet is, she is more like a weasel than ever.’ From an early age Beatrix Potter, a pretty, if disconcertingly observant child, saw the similarities between humans and other species: the childlike bravado of rabbits, the self-interest of certain cats and the unmistakeable resemblance of a middle-aged woman in a panic to a duck in a bonnet and shawl ...”

“... they were either lying or that they were mistaken.’ ‘What if Archbishop Corrigan and Bishop Potter so testified?’ This question, Friedland notes, was not allowed. Several cashiers from Houston were called to testify that the disputed signatures were not Rice’s. After one bank-teller too many the judge testily declined to hear from any ...”

“... sweeping, historical, socially aware and experimental novels of men? – has been going on since Jane Austen’s day. Charlotte Brontë was one who rejected Austen’s plot, which she called ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden’. Recently Gillian Beer even announced the death of the traditional women’s novel: instead of the masochistic themes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to carefully selected elites. Lionel Trilling, in his essay on Mansfield Park, suggested that Jane Austen was the pioneer of what he called ‘the Terror’ – the regime of modern individuality, under which we have to make our way without the comforts of religious rules or predestination, forming and projecting our own personality, judging others by our ...”

“... impute, is lost by Wodehouse, and turned into a mutually jokey fantasy from the world of Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright and Gussie Fink-Nottle. Intellectuals, and journalists looking for worms in the apple, find it hard to forgive Wodehouse for being so apparently sunny and straightforward. Surely there must be some dark secret somewhere? Reviews of his letters ...”

“... of the vanished men and women who gave rise to our parents’ lives, and our own. As she grows up, Jane Eyre learns about her lost mother and father, and draws strength from them; so too does Harry Potter. Popular fictions concede the power of inheritance even as they glamorise the courage of orphans. For those without an ...”

“... but it does sound strange in certain contexts. My daughter recently asked me if the Beatrix Potter frog, Jeremy Fisher, had a tail or a bottom. I wasn’t sure and opted for bottom. Sensing that I was discussing a human animal, she asked if he had a vulva. I felt this would be a very personal question for Jeremy, but I went ahead and said that Jeremy ...”

“... to work for, and thus an appropriate mode for upper-class layabouts. When Charlotte Brontë named Jane Eyre’s would-be seducer Rochester, it was this lineage of high-class moral ruffians she had in mind. Her hero belongs to that pantheon of literary characters who are beguiling not despite their wickedness but because of it. Rochester is finally ...”

“... penumbra of monastery buildings, complete enough to lend themselves for a scene or two in Harry Potter movies. Durham houses the tomb of early medieval Europe’s greatest historian, Bede, and that of another Anglo-Saxon monk, Cuthbert, probably a more effective bishop of Durham in death than in life. Cuthbert was also the name of the 16th-century bishop ...”

“... of a random sample of 93 of those leaving £100,000 was 71.1 years. The richest woman in Britain, Jane Innes, was also one of the oldest. She died in 1839, worth more than a million, at the age of 91. And the oldest person in Britain was also among the richest. Elizabeth Ramsden died in 1817, worth £140,000, at the age of 106. The average age at death of the ...”

“... chemically adapted as ever. They looked forward, impatiently, to the forthcoming Harry Potter, a device for blotting out the view from the window. A weapon, a comforting weight in the lap. Potter makes use of Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross: trainee wizards have to learn how to pass through the solid barriers ...”

“... arrested 14 months later. Escaping arrest, Soliah had gone underground, changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and built a new life for herself as the wife of a suburban doctor. In December 2001, she was sentenced to five years and four months’ imprisonment (later extended to 14 years) for attempting to blow up two Los Angeles police cars with a pipe bomb in ...”

“... opened in 2007, people have come from all over Europe to see exhibitions about the Bauhaus, the potter Lucy Rie and Gerhard Richter. Kate Brindley, the gallery’s director, boasted of a grant they’d won to build up a collection of postwar American drawings: ‘Middlesbrough will have drawings of a quality not yet in any other collection in the UK, not ...”