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“... don’t say is how you then discover you never felt he loved you. A hand on your arm would be a first: not true to life as you have lived it. Think, instead, of how he sent you to a shrink when you were eight, or nine. Shrinks – if you were in the business – were the panacea for everything. He had your IQ tested, you were fine – too fine, in fact ...”

“... at the outbreak of the Boer War. ‘Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line . . . I cannot conceal my joy at . . . yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full British battalions and a mountain battery were captured by the Boers!’ Britain’s hold on South Africa was significant for the ...”

“... The jacket of The Story of Ruth is adorned with praise from the famous: Edna O’Brien, among others, found it ‘disturbing and quite fascinating’, and Doris Lessing ‘a valuable book, an original’. It is a pity it comes in the kind of packaging that will repel the averagely fastidious reader. Duckworth have printed it in type about one size smaller than that of a Janet and John reader, and sub-titled it ‘one woman’s haunting psychiatric odyssey ...”

“... Ruth gave the Prime Minister as a Christmas card an old map of the Broadstairs area of Kent.’ The Prime Minister thanked her for it, writing from Chequers ‘in his own hand’. In his 1970-74 diaries Cecil King records a warm relationship between his wife, Dame Ruth Railton, and Edward Heath ...”

“... We still have a Queen of Crime. For nearly twenty years Ruth Rendell has been hailed as the successor to Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Allingham, perpetuating the old question of why it is that there should be a particularly feminine talent for detective fiction. Her Chief Inspector, Wexford by name, has joined the ranks of legendary police heroes, and although he is Sussex-based he can occasionally, via a nephew, call upon the resources of Scotland Yard ...”

“... treat it with respect. It might be me.’ And so it might. As Hunter Davies tells us in this first, thorough biography of the man, two months after he died in January 1991 at the age of 84, his wife and an old friend, both in their 70th year, climbed up to the tarn at seven in the morning by way of Honister old quarry and consigned his dust to that ...”

“... tolerance is almost nurse-like: some of these characters, one feels, should be denounced. In Ruth Jeremy Cooper displays a feminine consciousness with a peculiarly English style of dead-keen soppiness. Ruth is a lonely young lady in Somerset: she addresses God as ‘Goddi’ and her mother calls her ‘Ruthiemoo’. At ...”

“... Claude Monet’s first breakthrough was not the ‘impression’ of a sunrise that lent its name to a movement but a full-length figure in contemporary dress that he submitted to the Salon of 1866 under the title Camille. Posed against a red curtain on a canvas more than seven feet high, a woman in a green and black striped gown and a black jacket trimmed with fur stands with her back angled towards the viewer, her face partly visible as she turns her head over her shoulder and raises one gloved hand in a gesture both elegant and ambiguous ...”

“... high. The coverage is massive: over 2700 literary lives summarised, many if not most for the first time. Time will tell, but the biographical information strikes one as unusually reliable, and it often tacitly corrects previous reference sources. The bulk of the entries, apparently, were principally written by the three executive editors (Isobel Grundy ...”

“... drafted by the white Communist, Lionel Bernstein. The Congress itself was stage-managed: on the first day the Charter was simply recited to the delegates, who accepted it ‘by acclaim’, which meant that the front organisation delegates had done their job, shouting out applause and ramming it through. No wonder the Liberals, and the Pan-Africanists under ...”

“... not have done better than launch the Foundling Hospital – which he did, its doors receiving its first infant in 1741. Till then, England – unlike other countries – had had no hospice designed for abandoned babies, though such an idea had been floated in a characteristic gesture of lay piety by Addison in the Guardian. Unlike Continental refuges for ...”

“... of the ANC might have saved him from such egregious errors as his assertion that Joe Slovo and Ruth First, leading members of the then underground SACP, catapulted their ‘protégé’ Nelson Mandela to the leadership of the ANC, thereby ensuring that the armed struggle and the Communists would dominate the party for the next three decades. The ...”

“... They also found themselves at odds with the people they were studying. When Mead and Fortune first penetrated the Sepik region it had only recently come under effective Australian control. Their bearers, coastal men, dumped their baggage as soon as they breasted the Prince Alexander mountains, leaving them stranded among an impoverished and scattered ...”

“... George Lyttelton died on 1 May 1962, thus ending a correspondence which had begun in 1955; the first of the volumes edited by the survivor was published in 1978, the rest have appeared at intervals since. ‘For beginners’, as Rupert Hart-Davis puts it, mindful of those who have had to pick up the thread at some intermediate stage of the ...”

“... gone to the gulags or Paris, and knew that I was touching holy relics. ‘Here’s Mandelshtam’s first published verse,’ Galya translated. ‘These woodcuts are by Goncharova. And look: Blok. Bely. Gumilev.’ ‘The Acmeist who married Akhmatova?’ (I was such a show-off.) ‘Yes,’ they confirmed. ‘And this is the book with the cycle of poems ...”