"The figure of the must be one of the most familiar and abiding images in nineteenth-century literature. We know her b…"

"By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — has become a kind of symbolic mother to us a…"

"I was looking for a subject for my next book and failing to find one. My agent told me that during a recent lunch an …"

"In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of t…"

"… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in t…"

"In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of in . He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the pu…"

"My grandmother was a cat lady. She actually bred s. She also had a lot of books around. So I grew up with that. And t…"

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever …"

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clo…"

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it m…"