“... for his plummy fans any more than, say, J.G. Ballard should be blamed for the flakiness of his, or Anne Tyler for the limpness of hers. As for the books, they speak for themselves. Edmund Wilson once remarked of Powell that ‘he’s just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.’ This was presumably intended as a put-down, but to anyone ...”

“... noting them in a neat, regular hand. While we know little of her early life – when she was born, for example, or why she never married – we know a great deal about her business dealings, friendships and pastimes during her later years. Jeffreys never learned the double-entry bookkeeping practised by merchants, and her methods were so idiosyncratic ...”

“... and Twentieth-Century American Literature no less than 655. Great Writers indeed. Timothy Dwight, born in Northampton, Massachusetts 14 May 1752: ‘In his own time Timothy Dwight was a figure of towering significance.’ Arthur Murphy, born in Clomquin, Roscommon, 27 December 1727: his comedy The Upholsterer was produced ...”

“... comparable withholding of cues, carried through with much more ambition and method, is central to Anne Garréta’s short novel Sphinx, in which neither the narrator nor the love object is assigned a gender. They both earn a living at night, the narrator a DJ at Apocryphe, A*** a dancer at the Eden. Two opposites are attracted, and – after an emotional ...”

“... for their supernatural powers, the benandanti, who fought only for ‘Christ’s faith’, were born to their profession. Every man whose mother had preserved the caul (the placenta) in which he was born and wore it about his neck was compelled to ‘go forth’ when called to defend the crops. These night battles did ...”

“... cannot excuse the bathos, as we lurch into pages of panegyric to William of Orange and Queen Anne and a parade of Whig politicians. For a biographer, Defoe’s own sense of the importance of what he wrote must matter a good deal. During most of his career as a writer, he was preoccupied with politics. He was almost 60 when he published his first ...”

“... things – the actual course of Leonardo’s childhood and contemporary modes of representing St Anne and the Virgin – appear particularly damaging. There is evidence to suggest that Leonardo was brought up from the beginning in his father’s house, and the cult of St Anne had already given rise to the Anna Matterza ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... parts. The ‘master mistress’ of the poet’s passion should, according to Sonnet 20, have been born a woman. Unfortunately, great creating Nature fell in love with such perfect beauty and, being heterosexual herself,                by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. Shakespeare’s better angel, as ...”

“... wrought only by the gifted and devoted, rather than something occasionally engaged in by the well-born and cultivated.That was a long time ago, and the ballet has continued to renew itself, certainly of late with cordial help from Modern Dance. In this century, it was not just Modern Dance, nor the renovated modern ballet, but the Great American Musical ...”

“... sense. As Barker-Benfield says, ‘the corollary of Locke’s assumption that human minds were born as if they were blank sheets of paper was the unleashing of the power to shape their own lives.’ You could shape the lives of others, too, particularly your children, by manipulating the influences upon the nerves and brain for good results; it was the ...”

“... Yalom shows, appropriate breast-styles for the nurse which were not those that applied to a high-born or beautiful young mother.) Classical medical theory supported the value of wet-nursing – Aristotle had thought the thin watery milk of the new mother was bad for babies. Husbands also found it more convenient to have their wives give the children to ...”

“... it was correct to base his caricatures on the available press caricatures: Randy Andy, the equine Anne, the hearty Philip, and so on. Correct to be obvious? Why could he not go for an inspired guess, a bold and mysterious speculation? James seemed, in his interview, to think that fantasising of this sort would be ‘gossip’ of the kind he (looking ...”

“... made it momentous. His confident wilfulness emerged very early, shaped by family circumstances. Born in 1812 (he was an exact contemporary of Dickens), Pugin was an only child, cherished and praised. He was the product of an unlikely alliance between Auguste Pugin, a Parisian illustrator who had escaped revolutionary chaos by moving to London in 1792, and ...”

“... attention in Handley’s account. And they read: aloud or silently, by moon or candlelight. Lady Anne Clifford had devout material read to her in bed by her servants, who noted down ‘things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors’ on small pieces of paper which were then pinned around her bedstead so ...”