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“... to solicit my expert opinion was Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown, a social historian at Stanford University. The Times was particularly interested, the reporter explained, because another book about lesbian nuns in contemporary America had recently been published and was promptly banned from sale in ...”

“... in Uttar Pradesh, a virtual certainty. Is it possible to say anything new about Jawaharlal Nehru? Judith Brown’s study, factually repetitive and analytically anorexic, is disappointingly conventional. Benjamin Zachariah’s book is far more useful, placing its subject in the international context of his times. The founding father of modern India was ...”

“... A new history of the British Empire might be expected to concern itself with such issues as the construction of military dictatorship through the imposition of martial law; the violent seizure and settlement of land; the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples (and their culture and environment); the establishment of what is now called ‘institutional racism’; and the continuing coercion and induced movement of labour ...”

“... Despite its enormous learning, Judith Herrin’s work is marked by small personal touches which humanise the intricate story it tells. In an Afterword, she recalls a visit to Reichenau, which will ring bells for anyone who has visited the great monastic centres there and elsewhere around Lake Constance. In this small, quiet, sunny spot in the foothills of the Alps all the sources of Carolingian culture, both literary and artistic, had been concentrated by the mid-ninth century ...”

“... actions are accomplished at the same time as showing them happening. Her earliest treatment of Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1612-13) retains the broad compositional arrangement of Caravaggio’s gruesome depiction (c.1599) while altering important details. Judith’s arms cut across the picture in severe parallel ...”

“... at the turn of the 16th century, drove the stream of invention into furious eddies. Beverly Louise Brown, who edited the catalogue – seven of the 11 contributors are women: it seems proper that the critical eye cast on what is on the whole male peacocking should be female – cites a description of the atmosphere in Rome around 1604 from Karel van Mander’s ...”

“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”

“... the unsurprising movie was ‘based’ on this book. What it is really based on (very loosely) is Judith Thurman’s workmanlike biography of the Baroness, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, which Penguin Books has happily reissued, with a picture of ogling film stars on the cover. Judith Thurman was Associate Producer ...”

“... of sexual oppositions and identity politics. Feminist theorists including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber and Diana Fuss have called for more fluid work on questions of sexual difference which will address what Butler calls ‘gender trouble’. A number of recent studies focus on the radical potential of figures or practices at the ...”

“... were and in a weird way, loved. ‘The family provides the central structure of identification,’ Judith Williamson wrote in an essay on ‘Royalty and Representation’ in the 1980s. ‘They are at once like us and not like us … The ordinary held up for everyone to see.’ The dress that really made me gasp, though, was an off-the-peg number in mustard ...”

“... remains unread not because he is bad but because he is flat. On the evidence of Princess Daisy, Judith Krantz deserves her high place in the best-seller lists. This is the second time she has been up there. The first time was for a book called Scruples, which I will probably never get around to reading. But I don’t resent the time I have put into reading ...”

“... it), and some in Gordon Haight’s magisterial work as editor and biographer. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston have now provided a very welcome and complete edition of all the diaries and journals, covering the years between Eliot’s union with Lewes in 1854, when she was 35, and her death in 1880. Only around a quarter of this text has not previously ...”

“... written during the period in question. Most of the many translations of Akhmatova’s poems are by Judith Hemschemeyer and come from the recent collection edited by Reeder. These are by and large reliable as to content. Reeder herself translated many other things, with usually unhappy and occasionally grotesque results. Beth Holmgren’s book would on first ...”

“... enduring books. The first successful novel published under his own name, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), tapped into familiar Irish topoi: alcoholism, self-deception, loss of faith and the spare sad life of a spinster who seems like a debilitated hangover from Joyce’s Dubliners. But Moore obviously didn’t feel compelled to present his women ...”

“... successful friends and colleagues: pampered, chatty, good-looking Gaby; preening, manipulative Judith, Dorothy’s former PhD supervisor; and Elyse and Alexandra, both of whom have the kind of university job that Dorothy tells herself she can’t hope for. She doesn’t hope for much else either. Instead, she watches and listens to herself and reports ...”