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“... Lives, 1660-1900 quote a lawyer at the Old Bailey, cross-examining a woman called Margaret Jones in 1794. Jones’s pocket had been picked. He suggests to her that ‘ladies’ pockets are generally pretty full, they say there is no bottom to them?’ The witness bridles at the imputation: ‘I am very careful that I ...”

“... acted in James Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner. She became friends with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Roberta Flack and Toni Morrison, who later encouraged her to write her memoirs using dictation to capture her family’s speech. But she felt awkward, embarrassed by her poverty, and out of her depth. She was mistaken for someone’s mama when she got off ...”

“... Rupert Thomson’s​ new novel follows the contours of a remarkable life. Lucy Schwob, born in 1894 to a cultured and prosperous Nantes family, moved to Paris in 1920, where she developed strong links with the Surrealist movement and adopted the name Claude Cahun. Though she produced work in a number of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel ...”

“... he made a link between themes of absent women in his writing and what happened to his cousin Lucy Partington, whose disappearance was explained many years later when her body was found under Fred West’s house in Gloucester. He builds to a climax: ‘For now he [Fred West] will get from me a one-sentence verdict … Here is the sentence. West was a ...”

“... Go had contained a sympathetic portrait of a damaged but vital woman, under the name of Martha. Lucy Nelson, the central figure of his next novel, When She Was Good (1967), is just as damaged but also perversely destructive of herself and others, no longer a valiant survivor. She freezes to death on a winter’s night, having driven away anyone who might ...”

“... us sample questions from past papers. Wondering how Wordsworth and his undergraduate friend Robert Jones managed to miss their way at the Simplon Pass, as recorded in The Prelude, he walks the route and explains the topography. Later, to elucidate the account of ascending Snowdon in Book xiii of the poem, he puts on his boots again and pants up the poet’s ...”

“... to popular radio shows like Fibber McGee and Molly or Burns and Allen, when they watched I Love Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show, when they went to Red Sox baseball games and outdoor concerts by the Boston Pops, they were participating in a collective culture that did not acknowledge – either with interest or dislike – their difference. There was an ...”