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“... baptisms. I found the record of Aphra Behn’s baptism in the course of playing amanuensis to Maureen Duffy, of whom I was at that time a colleague, in her research for her biography of Aphra Behn. The terms of the problem were these. External evidence shows that Aphra Behn must have been born within a couple of years on either side of 1640. There ...”

“... took Jack’s hand, as the sun went down suddenly behind Queensmere in a scar of white light.’ Maureen Duffy in her novel is much better than most of the contributors to London Tales at evoking the sheer phenomenology (as I imagine it) of city living, with all the paraphernalia of entry-phones, the mail downstairs, the tiny flats: ‘She lives in a ...”

“... Twenty years ago, when Maureen Duffy first published The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89, Behn was still known principally as the celebrated but largely unread founder of women’s writing, the figure who had been hymned but effectively dismissed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,’ Woolf wrote, only to declare Behn’s actual writings to be so much cheerful hack-work, of interest only as the hack-work of a woman ...”

“... which novelists set out to express. One of the war’s prime characteristics, as is registered by Maureen Duffy’s title with its Spenserian echo, was, quite simply, social upheaval. ‘If your life does not please you,’ Wells’s Mr Polly discovered, ‘you can change it.’ But the change, in the peacetime world of Mr Polly, was from social realism ...”

“... head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets shouted down by the ...”

“... by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘The Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will to a strict Anglicanism ...”

“... Murdoch than she was willing to give.By 1967, Brophy’s affections had moved on to the playwright Maureen Duffy, with Murdoch’s encouragement (‘I, after all, am a fairly rock-like presence by now’). Duffy and Brophy put on an exhibition of homemade ‘heads and boxes’ playing on political and psychoanalytic ...”

“... cell in some slightly depraved cloister. Everybody does know everybody else. In the mid-1960s Maureen Duffy wrote an experimental novel called The Microcosm about the habituées of an old-style lesbian bar. The bar was loosely based on the Gateways in Earl’s Court – London’s most famous women’s pub until it shut down for ever in the ...”

“... US found that 36 per cent of mammography facilities were producing images of unacceptable quality. Maureen Roberts, who led the Edinburgh Breast Cancer Screening Project until she herself died from the disease in 1989, wrote in an article published after her death that ‘we can no longer ignore the possibility that screening may not reduce mortality in women ...”