“... and strong. Jackson, Mississippi was Parker’s home base during Richard’s early life but small-town, small-farm Arkansas was evidently the shaping force in the lives of both parents. These seem to have been on the whole cheerful but small, too, in the sense of ...”

“... vaut mieux le travail que la rêverie’ is said to have been pasted on the wall of the small, squalid room on Westbourne Terrace where she spent her final years. She died in 1956 but is only now receiving her first retrospective, at Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s house in Sussex (until 30 August). The drawings and paintings selected ...”

“... them back to an institution where they could be formally named. On 6 August 1852, Wallace’s ship Helen burned in the water, taking with it all of his precious Amazon collections. ‘How many times,’ he wrote later, ‘when almost overcome by the ague had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species!’ How could he bear ...”

“... itself) and with the identity of form and meaning. Merely – though of course it was not a small ‘merely’ – he argued against the hermetic tendencies of Symboliste aesthetics. He praised Yeats for insisting that poetry was made for ordinary human beings and for ignoring the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the ...”

“... Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Longley. Yet their audience is relatively small. What’s different about Heaney? Fennell has several answers extraneous to poetry, but he ends up highlighting the academic agendas satisfied by his verse.As in every good story, there is a villain. At first, Fennell says, Heaney was inexplicit because ...”

“... suffragism can then move centre-stage, and the dust-jacket appropriately display the suffragette Helen Ogston horsewhipping male stewards at a public meeting in 1908. And Christabel Pankhurst’s notorious articles of 1913 on venereal disease, which urged votes for women and chastity for men, can move from the feminist periphery into the British feminist ...”

“... evenings of discussion among the courtiers of Guidobaldo da Montefeltre, the ruler of the small princely state of Urbino, in 1507. Many of the issues discussed are not obviously connected with the pursuit of life as art. The book includes, among other barriers to enjoyment, a long discussion of jokes and how to tell them. Issues that were central to ...”

“... into a terribly effective atomic bomb carrier’, as he wrote in Collier’s magazine in 1952. ‘Small winged rocket missiles with atomic warheads could be launched from the station in such a manner that they would strike their targets at supersonic speeds.’ Stuff like this may not have scared the Americans much, but it sent the Russians into paroxysms of ...”

“... of the government’. He makes no attempt to understand the system as it actually operates. Helen Yaffe’s premise runs counter to DePalma’s: rather than presenting state and people as opposed, she describes the relationship between them as ‘extremely permeable’. She argues that citizens are directly involved in the governing system, helping it ...”

“... the future Edward VII, who was not mouldable. He tried hard but had, as his mother put it, a ‘small empty brain’ and persistent discouragement and criticism made him unhappy and rebellious. He was growing up to be a worry and a disappointment. Towards the end of the 1850s Albert seems to have lost heart and begun to give up the unequal struggle that had ...”

“... And of those national societies, none was more important than the British League of Nations Union. Helen McCarthy’s book is the first full study of the LNU to be published in more than thirty years. It is an important work of recovery. Almost forgotten today, the LNU was one of the largest and most vibrant voluntary associations of the interwar years. With ...”

“... holds to his priorities is well illustrated in Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s ...”

“... is wearing no make-up. Her pink mouth has a full underlip and you can see the glint of small white teeth. Her brown eyes are wide open. She is looking towards the light source and her pupils are so precisely defined that they reflect the window divided by the horizontal bar of the window frame she is looking at. The mirror of her eyes reminds me of ...”

“... in his sumptuously lit study. I liked that he threw books on the floor. No one came to the small gallery in the hour I stayed there. It was late October. The days were foggy. By lunchtime, a pale sun fought to break through, and, for about an hour before it did, an unearthly and sickly yellow light clung to everything. And then there was sunshine. One ...”

“... literate of serfs did not have civil rights. ‘People could be bought and sold wholesale or in small numbers, by families or singly like bulls and sheep,’ Nikitenko writes. He is being circumspect. Though he doesn’t excuse the system, and even talks of its ‘corruptive effects’, there is much that he doesn’t say. For the majority of serfs, after ...”