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“... 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 ...”

“... salone: the frowning Stoic, the scowling Cynic, the po-faced female allegory. He relies on a very small repertory of hand movements, just as his pigment-shopping never ventures beyond the cheap materials expended on the Empedocles canvas. There are the skittering light-streaks that activate valleys and skies in his narrative landscapes: the lush, fat cupping ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... quality of self-possession characteristic of McEwen. From left to right they are a broken bud, a small leaf lightly withered, a larger leaf also withered, a piece of bark, three seed pods, a torn branch and a sycamore seed with one wing missing. Writing about another series of leaf paintings, which he titled by the places where they were found rather than by ...”

“... Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton Anthology of English Literature’s supremacy in the American textbook market; and, in the last month of the last century, of the ...”