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“... was solemnised by Southey and Coleridge in joint marriage to a pair of sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker – a lucky shot for Southey, very much less so for Coleridge. The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an energy of ...”

“... skeletal face’ as Deedes ‘lifted his glass of water and sipped it’. Thirteen years after his death she is still chewing over this ‘unpleasant’ encounter which she now attributes to Deedes’s own ‘twilight relationship’ with a much younger writer at the paper. In fact, she had simply dealt the wrong card. She played ...”

“... confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that floated it. Gillray worked from a similar ambition. Unlike Fielding, he made a career of it.His nearest precursor was Hogarth, in the kinetic scenes of Marriage à ...”

“... view of Medieval Europe – it comes just after a sentence which declares that the Black Death drove all fit people to work on the land, a view so wrong one hardly knows where to start correcting it – the tone of confidence in modern progress and ‘the Western World’ is unmistakable. But are children really ‘a separate kind of ...”

“... black and white dress is belied by its gloss. Her late husband had been in the slave trade. Mrs Sarah Clayton (a courtesy ‘Mrs’, she was unmarried) held a leading position in the coal trade in Liverpool; she points to a plan of Clayton Square, a development she oversaw personally. In this portrait, although the setting is not outdoors, the ...”

“... a corpse-filled sea; the crew drinking themselves senseless to blunt the horrors of near-certain death; and, on the adjacent cliffs, country folk aghast at a catastrophe they can do nothing to alleviate. An all too frequent scene is that of sailors, deeming themselves safe at last, broaching spirits in such quantities that they die on the spot. Fourteen ...”

“... which influenced her frequent habit of using male narrators. During her McClure years she met Sarah Orne Jewett whose preference for ‘everyday people who grow out of the soul’ she much approved, though she mocked the old-fashioned life lived by Jewett and her female companion in Boston. In New York Cather formed a circle of admiring women friends ...”

“... to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death Comes for the Archbishop, from doughboys grateful for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted ...”

“... for Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem, where Meir gave birth to a son, Menachem, in 1924 and a daughter, Sarah, two years later. But Meir felt ‘suffocation and resentment’: she had moved to Palestine ‘to become a new Jew, cultivating the land with her toil’, in the words of her earlier biographer Francine Klagsbrun in Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of ...”

“... her loving focus as curiosity he didn’t welcome. He became secretive. But after her husband’s death two years earlier Lucie Freud had tried to kill herself. She lost interest in the world and stopped worrying about her son. Her new lack of concern liberated him. His paintings of her are some of the most memorable he ever made. Each is distinct and ...”

“... can penetrate, lilith and cain are like two swordsmen sharpening their blades for a duel to the death,’ and a moment later: ‘lilith, when she does finally open her legs to allow herself to be penetrated, will not be surrendering, but trying to devour the man to whom she said, Enter.’ The terse biblical narrative, as many readers over the generations ...”

“... a greasy sky.’ ‘The oven as womb./The oven as grave.’ Because she imagines her own death so often, and because she’s so sensitive to the particular traps facing women and girls, she’s able to depict at once the contingent, politically salient evils of life under a toxic patriarchy – the double binds of working mothers, the threat of ...”

“... Fallaize and I decided to draw attention to the situation again. Fallaize, whose premature death at the end of last year Beauvoir scholars mourn, analysed the effects of the vast cuts Parshley made in the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’. I wrote about Parshley’s philosophical confusions, drew attention to a number of elementary French ...”

“... but he can barely let himself even kiss her, for fear of ‘losing control’, squashing her to death in his super-powered passion – ‘I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don’t realise how incredibly breakable you are’ – or biting her to death in uncontrollable ...”

“... the window, she has time only to save one object before fleeing: either a compact disc reissue of Sarah Bernhardt declaiming from Phèdre or an old sepia-tinted postcard of Eleonora Duse in D’Annunzio’s La Città morta. Quick! Which to choose? The Bernhardt has always been a source of deep hilarity: given the primitive acoustic equipment (the original ...”