“... glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of stories, poems, essays, bulletins and magazine ...”

“... they cou’d: If they forbear their Neighbours to devour, ’Tis not for want of Will, but want of Power Rochester was, surprisingly, one of Defoe’s favourite poets. The allusion in the second line is to an aphorism from Rochester’s ‘Satire against Reason and Mankind’: ‘For all men would be cowards if they durst.’ However, you wouldn’t want to ...”

“... Fifties; nor have I ever met a woman to whom I have been romantically drawn because she resembled Anne Frank, or whom I mentally transformed into Anne Frank and endowed with her status in order to try to clear myself of Jewish charges of self-hatred and anti-semitism.Though some readers may have trouble disentangling my ...”

“... carried the glamour and danger of scandal and shame, Dean and a local girl in her late teens, Anne-Marie, become lovers. The photographer, who narrates and, as he breaks off to explain to the reader, invents the details of Dean and Anne-Marie’s sexual journey, nonetheless frames the story in terms of his own ...”

“... virulent, as well as being frequently obscene and licentious. The reigns of William III and Queen Anne were marked by intense political partisanship, and the language used in attacks on government and parliament provoked retaliation. The Stamp Duty Act of that year caused Swift to lament ‘that all Grub Street is ruined.’ This was an exaggeration. The ...”

“... counters by saying that if we go now, tamely and without negotiation, when we actually have some power, then we might as well forget about union organisation down at Wapping. Murdoch will have won and that will be that. We vote on the following motion: ‘In view of the fact that the management refuses to negotiate on its ultimatum, concerning Sunday Times ...”

“... Establishmentarians and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot ...”

“... could not chill his exuberant flow of invention, or exclude him from centres of prestige and power. Dazzlingly precocious, he was designing furniture for the king in Windsor Castle at the age of 15. Towards the end of his short life (he died in 1852, at the age of 40), he was almost single-handedly responsible for the decoration and furnishing of the ...”

“... villain and victim, hopelessly entwined. This Gothic tale, Rose demonstrates, ‘seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches it into its orbit, to make you feel that somehow you belong’. The story ‘at once involves you and asks for judgment’. Although she gives a stunning account of the way those who have controlled the Plath archive – her ...”

“... talked about packing a lot of things into a single brushstroke … The idea of paint having that power was something that made me feel I ought to get to know it in a different way that wasn’t subservient. I wanted to see what it could do. ‘By the time the war ended,’ Freud said, ‘I was longing to go to Paris. I went in 1946 when you were allowed to ...”

“... ability. Lauretta Ngcobo (a contemporary South African novelist) has as much in common with Anne Bradstreet as with Athol Fugard – if not more. And Anne Bradstreet has as much in common with Ifeoma Okoye (a Nigerian writer of children’s stories) as with Cotton Mather, or more. Riding alongside is the assumption ...”

“... We no longer have his manuscript corrections, only the edition produced from them by his daughter Anne in 1801. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, the editors of the Oxford edition, suggest that Anne might well have included changes of her own, as well as those of Richardson’s other daughter, Martha, who had died in ...”

“... Teffi was among the celebrants, but she detested the Bolshevik takeover of language along with power. ‘If several robbers attack one passer-by this is called the “socialisation of capital”. But if one person attacks several passers-by, this is ideologically unsound and is called “capitalist individualisation”.’ One after another the Bolsheviks ...”

“... half-drowned and drugged – and he is haunted by memories of his attendance at the beheading of Anne Boleyn and at the burning of heretics, one immolation so slow they ‘fairly sweated the blood out of him’. Poverty upsets him, most of all the children ‘thin and ragged, displaying their sores and deformities’ that drift through the ...”

“... or like Audrey Tautou, the latest face of Chanel No. 5, who also plays the young Coco Chanel in Anne Fontaine’s Coco before Chanel. So far as one can tell, Chanel was never fully contented (she boasted that she did not require ‘that daily dose of poison, recently invented, that we call happiness’ and her restless scissors were always ...”