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“... Judith Richardson begins Possessions by quoting a 1933 guidebook to the Hudson Valley: ‘How comes the Hudson to this unique heritage of myth, ghosts, goblins and other lore?’ By the end of her exhaustive chronicle of local history and legend the answer is self-evident: ‘Why is the Hudson Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not be?’ Until I read this book, the Hudson Valley seemed remote from anguished, obviously possessed sites like ravaged towns in Mississippi and throughout the Deep South, the battlefield at Gettysburg, Hollywood or even the foggy menace of Seattle ...”

“... the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the Defence’. They would have heard from new alibi witnesses for Paul Hill and Carole Richardson; evidence that Carole Richardson and Patrick Armstrong were heavily abusing drugs at the time of their arrest; and medical experts would have testified that their confessions were false. The only evidence against the ...”

“... major commission came in 1913, from Lady Hamilton, whose niece worked for Diaghilev, and who, in Judith Collins’s words, wanted to turn her own home into ‘the approximation of a stage-set for a Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty ...”

“... that Hugo Gernsback invented SF, that the ‘rise of the novel’ is synonymous with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, there is something usefully corrective in the Companion’s counter-claims. They are not the first to be one-sided. It is astonishing, looking back at Ian Watt’s book, for instance, to find that no woman novelist figures in his account. In ...”

“... slaves and their labour, the other items on Sheridan’s list would have made little impact. David Richardson is more outspoken in an essay on the economics of the slave trade. Differences may exist among historians about the amount of money the slave trade made for Britain, but he has little doubt that merchants of the British Empire, the leading shippers of ...”