“... years of forewords, personal statements and reviews, none as explosive as her earlier essays on Bishop and Dickinson, on sexuality and motherhood. They are valuable mostly because they come from the author of those essays and of the poems. The language Rich uses to praise the late June Jordan is typical: ‘She believed, and nourished the belief, that ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote ...”

“... totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames. The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather ...”

“... Christian scripture, but eventually lost faith in geology and abandoned his studies to become a bishop. He told a friend in a letter in 1671 that, in truth, nothing was really known about the origins of natural objects such as fossils.Despite Steno’s pessimism, fossils became widely accepted as evidence of the past existence of organisms now extinct. As ...”

“... sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane Lewis have had to depend while putting together their syntheses. In this case, the omission of Scotland and Ireland might seem uncontentious. Ireland’s was another story. The Scottish narrative would be similar in respect of government ...”

“... were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded the Indian market. Bishop Heber, that acute observer and author of the lines ‘though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’, reported that ‘the peasantry in the Company’s provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects of the ...”

“... cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a ...”

“... loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage parlour); the queen mother’s lodged fishbone; James Hewitt; Kate’s wife-attacking Uncle Gary; Beatrice and Eugenie and their fascinators; Charles’s ex, Whiplash Wallace; William’s nightclub-owning friend, Guy Pelly; Pippa Middleton; Peter Ball, the kiddy-fiddling ...”

“... to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so often visualised himself, addressing the House of Commons in the tones befitting that ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the ...”

“... of priest and doctor. Dr Rabelais, like Father Rabelais, comforts the afflicted. A Platonising bishop held that the surname Rabelais, by mystical Hebrew etymology, truly means ‘Prince of Mockers’. In 1818 Hazlitt ended his introductory lecture ‘On the English Comic Writers’ not with Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Congreve, Sterne or Garrick but with ...”

“... Morgan worked and played with an intensity that wore out younger colleagues and rivals. The Bishop of Massachusetts said that a visit from Morgan left him feeling ‘as if a gale had blown through the house’. In 1901 Henry Adams reported that ‘London and Berlin are standing in perfectly abject terror, watching Pierpont Morgan’s nose flaming over ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... is epistemological as well as moral: Yeats spurned English empiricism for the Irish idealism of Bishop Berkeley, which allowed him to believe that if you didn’t like the world you could always invent another one. His art is a performative one, conjuring, mythifying, erasing, memorialising, invoking; ‘Easter 1916’ promulgates the Dublin uprising into ...”

“... committed spiritual healer, Osofo, a pastor of the Church of the Smiling Saint. While his gentle bishop calms and cajoles the sick, Osofo overwhelms them with his zeal and intensity. ‘God has put some fire into his hands.’ In religious exaltation, Osofo leads his Christian flock through Accra, chanting against the Government: ‘One whole country cannot ...”