“... do not line up neatly in support of one another, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance and writing.’ Queen Anne is the most prominent example of a woman whose mixed loyalties resulted in ‘self-definition’. Her husband was reluctant to acknowledge her autonomous royal status as the ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... helped by seeing herself as a Jew in Dachau or a Chinese concubine. It is necessary to know why we may be despised and exactly how contempt may be empowered to destroy us. To acquire such knowledge we have to find our own language and make it as exact as possible. When Emily Dickinson wrote of ‘infection in the ...”

“... identified, identity and the ability to distinguish between different identities is nothing. This may represent an ideal of Shakespeare’s, who was the father of twins, though of different sex. There is nothing more frustrating for parents than mistaking their own twins. They feel guilty and at the same time awed that they cannot distinguish between two ...”

“... if not definitiveness to his thinking. The ideological components in Hume’s political thought may be taken – as Miller takes them – to start with ‘his conception of human nature, about which he held a view mid-way between the pessimism of, say, Hobbes and the optimism of, say, Rousseau or Godwin’. In Miller’s excellent phrase, the postulate is ...”

“... of our marriage, Alvarez has cast me in a variety of roles, from Jungle Jane to Giant Sloth. It may come as a surprise to him to find me among his critics. Life after Marriage follows much the same pattern as his best-selling The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. The personal bit, the friends, the literary figures. A formula that was perhaps worthy of ...”

“... as might be expected, trace the origins of the condition to early childhood. The mother may have failed to help the child sort out and label feelings, or perhaps the father avoided the discussion of emotions. Alexithymics can sometimes be helped to establish good relationships by acting as though they had feelings. ‘They learn to infer what they ...”

“... being a grim reminder of the lengths to which violence was carried. But however non-paranoid one may in general be about the Police, one cannot but feel very uneasy both about some of the things that happened in the mining villages, and about the de facto creation during the strike of a national police force whose accountability to anyone was difficult to ...”

“... she says, ‘is a synonym for intercourse.’ But consensual intercourse may be even worse than rape because it reduces women to the state of ‘collaborators’. Throughout this book, men are compared to the Nazis, though ‘from Auschwitz to the Gulag’ there is ‘no analogue amongst subordinated groups’ to the condition of ...”

“... book plays for roughly the first 24 hours of peace in a small town in Germany, on a Wednesday in May 1945; and yet, as we shall see, and as the translation has it, a little fortuitously, because the word is Ruhe (‘quiet’), ‘there’s never a moment’s peace in our town.’ There is a famous concrete poem/ calendar which goes something like ...”

“... one, that he deserves better than to be regarded as merely one of Auden’s acolytes; two, that he may be seen as precursor to the young poets in Northern Ireland who have been making a stir, if not a Renaissance, since 1968. The first reason is cogent. MacNeice’s work didn’t issue from Auden’s overcoat; it is time to remove it from the simplifications ...”

“... progress of the African continent. The wish for Africans to understand the ‘dignity of labour’ may look ironic, but it meant that British industrialists were keen to take action to end their dependence on slavery, a dependence which by that time had lasted nearly two centuries. Higgs’s Chocolate Islands relates William Cadbury’s efforts to find out ...”

“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”

“... other collection of verse – a slim chapbook, The Astropastorals, first published in 2017. One may well wonder what Crase was doing in those intervening decades.Among other things, he was writing essays and books of non-fiction. Lines from London Terrace, published last year, brings together a range of his pieces on literature, painting and culture ...”

“... to the public of what that strategy might be. The DGSE could try to suborn another member of May’s team to provide corroboration, but this is risky and could expose both the DGSE and their contact. At the heart of this game of betrayal is trust: the source of the intelligence must be trusted by his or her handler. The reader of the intelligence report ...”