“... on equal terms. So, too, with the slightly more ambiguously gendered Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. As in surgery, literary sex change is an ugly operation and female chauvinists must rejoice to see a complete turn of the wheel in those areas of fiction where the practice is still necessary. When the Texan six-footer Tom Huff wished to make it big with a ...”

“... A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a linguistically complicated idea of what ‘British’ meant. Sean Shesgreen’s ‘Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...”

“... is every bit as immobilised; notice in the following lines Merrill’s ‘always’, the bell-jar dropped over the paralysed moment: Always The moment comes to gaze As the tall emblem pivots and rides out To the opposite side, always ... By 1962, with the publication of Water Street, Merrill had hit his stride. Now he could find perfection, or at ...”

“... leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the site quibbled with local activists who held that it was important to memorialise the fact that Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved woman forced to work for ...”

“... state liable to pay damages for serious abuses of power. The leading British commentary, Brown and Bell, holds that ‘the surprising feature’ of French administrative law, given its Napoleonic origin, is the fact that ‘it has survived to provide one of the most systematic guarantees of the liberties of the individual against the state anywhere in the ...”

“... summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York’ (The Bell Jar). Good ones can do ordinary and extraordinary at once; they can do the novel in miniature. Grant seems to know what the sentence can do for her but fails to do anything special with it, other than set the scene. Even the thought seems run of the ...”

“... produced such constitutional anomalies as the interruption of legal argument when the division bell rang (something I witnessed more than once as a barrister) so that one or more of the law lords could go and vote in the chamber.It is against this background that Frederic Reynold’s story of what he calls high principle and low politics begins. Reynold, a ...”

“... comics and the like could be made to serve some of the goals set for high art from Rembrandt and David to Rothko and Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ...”

“... of Manning’s teens. The Braybrookes tell us that ‘she used to have dreams in which Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia came floating towards her like beautiful swans.’ An assiduous user of the public library, the young Olivia took out Jacob’s Room almost as soon as it arrived there. But her tastes were catholic: Rider Haggard’s Zulu Trilogy ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker seems to have none. No more does she ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... Royal Africa Company to salvage a sunken treasure-ship off the Sussex coast, designing a diving-bell for the purpose, and going down in it himself. From 1698 to 1701, he was master and commander of the tiny Royal Navy ship Paramore, again in the South Atlantic. This was, it has been said, ‘the first sea journey undertaken for a purely scientific ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his hand to get it.’ This selfishness was not a reversion to ...”