“... beatings; when grown she allowed her father, in financial and perhaps criminal straits, to rob her of her legacy. When her married sister Eliza fell into a postpartum depression that declared itself in a mad, violent loathing for her husband, Wollstonecraft, reminded perhaps of her victimised mother, perhaps of her psychotic younger brother, organised ...”

“... meaning for dreams. A child ‘retains his belief and renounces it’. Freud writes that two young men had ‘failed to acknowledge’ their father’s death and also that they had taken ‘full account of this fact’: ‘The wishful attitude and the realistic attitude existed side by side.’ We find ways of reconciling ‘what the drive demands and ...”

“... to hate him, to see him as a child-killing monster, but instead I found a rattled, frightened young man, short, slight, and so pale that the bluish veins on his neck and shoulders were visible.’ After a long bourbon-soaked conversation, Calley interrupted Hersh’s questioning to phone the man who had been his immediate superior in Vietnam, Captain ...”

“... and to possess the knowledge of life. But to come so quickly to so glib a conclusion would rob us of the pleasure of enquiring into the fabric of the poetry itself.Hard-bitten, aggressively up-to-date in the way it took cognisance of the fallen contemporary landscape, yet susceptible also to the pristine scenery of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon ...”

“... his most personal and revealing poems, “The Subverted Flower”.’ The poem certainly reveals a young woman’s revulsion when she perceives unconcealed sexual desire in her young man, who suddenly appears bestial in her eyes – but as to her ‘defloration’ precisely nothing at all is said. Meyers seems unaware that ...”

“... the mother? Isn’t the mother really just a father, in the end, and the father a mother? Why do young people not think anything? Why are children so unbearable? Is it because of television, or pornography, or comic books? … And women: are they capable of supervising male workers on the same basis as men are? Of thinking like men, of being ...”

“... time she had seen her mother, she insisted that Ida wear a comb to make her look more ‘like a young woman’. On the Auschwitz ramp, she speculates, it made her look old enough for a work-detail. There are a few more such testimonies. But the Shoah is by and large represented here neither in first-person accounts of the camps nor in pictures of its worst ...”

“... of the academic spinster Margaret, a woman whose sole offence was to be physically unattractive to young men. As the woman question has grown more noticeable, Amis’s gallery of male chauvinists has grown too, until in Stanley and the Women he has created a world in which only men appear to communicate with one another, and their favourite topic is their ...”

“... as though they possessed some special felicity that was more fertile than strength.’When a young man called Kendrick arrives with a terrible pronouncement, Darrelhyde identifies in him the danger of science without humanity. Kendrick pursues progress but doesn’t really think about where his or anyone else’s experience fits in. He knows to smile and ...”

“... her painfrom one continent/to anotherNichols focuses on the tragic effect on slaves when they rob or pay back their owners. ‘Eulogy’ remembers ‘the leaping suicide/ones’ of the Middle Passage. Infanticide leads one slave woman to be punished as a ‘rebel’: staked-out, covered with molasses (what she has been enslaved to make), eaten alive by ...”

“... to enjoy a country girl called Sasha. It was a huge amount of information for an inexperienced young woman to absorb in a very short time with a crucial deadline pending. ‘I don’t think,’ Sonya wrote years later, ‘I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries … I can still remember … the horror of that first appalling experience of ...”

“... and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to rob Ahab of his metaphysical glamour and to think, rather, about his effect on the world around him: the new, politicised reading of Moby-Dick was a critical celebration of America’s vigorous adolescence as an economic power and a dark premonition of its ...”

“... by her gender that she has literalised it by erasing herself from her own story. Every time a young woman in a novel sits down and thinks very hard about gender and what she is and is not allowed to do, I think of Zola. Perhaps this is why Nana bored me. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘another terrible woman who feels she’s mediocre at her job wanting to devour ...”

“... who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in the Moon. What is more interesting than Falstaff’s ancient joke is ...”

“... assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is also a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language which produces felicities such as: ‘Not a blade of grass moved and not a bird flew down the perspective of the great water, but, under thickety trees, officers and children skated ...”