“... for a set of right-wing policies espoused in the 1970s by Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and by miscellaneous demented conservatives ever since: ‘rolling back the state’ and ‘empowering the individual’ through privatisation, tax cuts and deregulation. But before that it referred to a body of theory about markets and how ...”

“... about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple goose-pimpled legs of English women in miniskirts. She wrote about air raids and ...”

“... answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps ...”

“... sifting of possibilities like that undertaken by her sandpiper combing the beach for rare quartz, rose and amethyst grains amid the millions that are black, white, tan and grey, can a poem be released into the dizzy freedom of the ‘rainbow-bird’ of one of her final poems, ‘Sonnet’, ‘flying wherever/it feels like, gay!’ ‘Writing poetry,’ she ...”

“... had to cut off their fashionable long toe-pieces when forced to fight the Swiss infantry on foot; Margaret of Parma, another illegitimate child of Charles V by a different serving wench, who grew and carefully trimmed a moustache to provide her with an air of authority when her father made her governor of the Low Countries; Princess Stephanie of Belgium (the ...”

“... by Paz – between Sor Juana’s situation and that of the mostly Indian rioters of 1692 who rose against an unpopular viceroy at a time of exceptional crop-failure. Both are said to reveal the lack of modern political ideas which could have led to a project of reform. Paz observes of Sor Juana that she colluded with her oppressors. It may be that he ...”

“... quoted in Miss Fane in India were written to her aunt in England. She finds the future Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer, ‘a little, ugly, underbred-looking thing’; the talkative Misses Eden, Emily and Frances, are old and ugly and stink like polecats. There is a long tedious dinner at the Babington Macaulays, but the host escapes personal ...”

“... health and the loss of their home. Bessie Bellwood, who began as a rabbit skinner in Bermondsey, rose to fame as a blowsy, loud-mouthed, proudly proletarian singer, had numerous affairs with aristocrats and narrowly avoided debtors’ prison. She died of heart disease at the age of 39. Vesta Victoria, who started as a clog dancer and made her name with the ...”

“... gives it a very different feel to most current Western sci-fi (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood and others), which is largely pro-left. It’s not just the books’ portrayal of revolutionary groups and the state’s economic role. In the novels, the world hundreds of years in the future is still organised cladistically: America is a power ...”

“... Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of ...”

“... herself to condemn the lynching of black males for ‘atrocities worse than death’. Similarly, Margaret Sanger, a feminist, socialist and family planner, promoted vaginal diaphragms in heroic defiance of the Comstock laws, but also urged the sterilisation of racial inferiors. Is the conjunction of race and liberal freedoms any less surreal today, when, in ...”

“... In private he was a nonconformist, living in a cabin in the Virginia backwoods with his wife, Margaret, who had grown up among Presbyterian missionaries.As chief of the newly constituted Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff, Gottlieb set about expanding and refining Dulles’s programme. The trials on ‘expendables’, in his estimation, had ...”

“... afford it. You see, if we don’t rehearse, and if we don’t-a play, that runs into money. Margaret Dumont, most imperturbable of straight men, was the aristocratic foil to all the boys in Animal Crackers, and when the circus of Harpo reeled around her, or poked her with a stick, or got his foot caught in her sleeve, Dumont’s suffering was ...”

“... part in it. Then Douglas Carswell, the Tory backwoodsman who has tabled a motion of no confidence, rose and demanded that time be made available for a debate. ‘It’s not a substantive motion,’ the Speaker replied. ‘Oh yes it is,’ came voices from all sides. Extraordinary. I’ve never seen the Speaker heckled before. It was like watching Ceausescu’s ...”

“... the bomb’s principal designer, was given the honour of making the first toast: Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: ‘May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.’ The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Everyone froze. [Deputy Minister of Defence, Marshal ...”