“... of her ‘two talents … two things that give me a reason to go on living … is required any more’. The two things are ‘writing music and bringing up children’. This is a little melodramatic, but she knows this. At one point she imagines it may be her ‘destiny … to be always alone’, yet she also sees this as a ‘tragic, self-dramatising ...”

“... time these impressions change. In the campus bookshop he finds editions of Duns Scotus and Saint Thomas Aquinas (who, he says, have never been translated into French); in the library there are yards of shelving devoted to French literature. He likens America to 19th-century Britain in being at the same time innovatory and conservative. His Paris ...”

“... of, and thought of herself, as a grande dame – inher case, of children’s literature, or, more specifically, of stories about ‘animals who behave like humans, and even mix with them on equal terms’. She hadn’t Beatrix Potter’s insight in these matters. In Beatrix Potter’s books there is a moment when, without explanation, the rabbit loses ...”

“... horses; but the car is a time-machine on which one can slide from one century to another at no more trouble than the pushing forward of a lever.’ The smoothness and audacity of the narrative transitions between ancient and modern in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) may owe something to the stinking Lanchester: or, rather, to ...”

“... alone NHS dentists) are harder to come by. In June this year, 102,000 people waited more than twelve hours to be seen in A&E, and another 441,000 waited for between four and twelve hours. Social care budgets, which have remained below 2010 levels over the last decade, leave patients who should be discharged stranded in hospital – accounting ...”

“... count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,’ as Humbert Humbert says in Lolita); Tabor is a more restricting instrument. Motion warns us that Tabor was a sometime imitator of Wordsworth with a poetic tone as ‘dry as biscuit’. And at moments he plausibly resembles a genuine Wordsworthian bore (the narrator of ‘The Thorn’, for example): ‘a ...”

“... applied arts was challenged. Art as a privileged category of its own was finally secured. Clearly, more is at stake in this account of the aesthetic regime than any local reading of modernist art as a passage from figuration to abstraction; the shift from the representative order, Rancière writes in The Future of the Image, ‘does not consist in painting ...”

“... uninterested, but with a strange surge of reluctance and even dread – deep deep down’. ‘He more or less laughed, not a full laugh, a sort of dampened chuckle.’ ‘He dragged off his coat as if it were a mental hindrance and let it drop to the floor.’ From this oddly encumbered, shy, somehow reinhibited manner – as though he were impersonating a ...”

“... Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary, ‘He is the most wonderful man I have known,’ then added more equivocally: ‘unique in this, that he had no thought for anything or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand.’ This handsome new edition of Morris’s letters does not entirely answer our natural question of how a man so often ...”

“... radical chic would have been much the same as his, but we might have the impression that it was a more settled part of her life-style and her way of facing society. Both made considerable social efforts, anxious to charm, particularly prospective employers and men in the media. Signs of strain in the marriage? Rather conspicuously absent, except for young ...”

“... the saints in Latin in tenth-century Saxony? Hrotsvit hopes that ‘the Giver of my talent all the more be justly praised through me, the more limited the female intellect is believed to be.’ No doubt the self-deprecation is mostly literary convention, but it feels a long way from crushing flint with teeth. And what do ...”

“... up in six years 3266 devotees of thuggee, hanged 412 and imprisoned or transported hundreds more, extinguishing a centuries-old cult. The method of this religious fraternity had been to ingratiate themselves with travellers, strangle them suddenly with a scarf, then rob and bury them. By contrast, the English highwayman behaved, or tried to behave, like ...”

“... anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the 1850s, white supremacist politicians of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over ...”

“... great length, only a year later. De Morgan lived to be 88 and wrote seven novels, as well as two more which were completed by another hand and published posthumously. They were mostly long books, and the first four came out at annual intervals, for de Morgan seems to have found fiction very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”