“... and Pope use allusion when writing about inheritance and succession; Burns, about coupling and love-children; Byron, about money; Tennyson, about winds, ghosts and solitude. These topics weren’t chosen at random: Ricks makes the interesting claim that ‘allusion can be self-delightingly about allusion.’ Allusions occur in passages that concern ...”

“... has said. ‘Everything in this book is a little exaggerated: the horror, of course, but also the love.’ Just about everybody who doesn’t beat or rape Jude loves him: his friends; his pro-bono physician, Andy, who despite his better judgment never has Jude committed for his self-harm; and his law professor, Harold, who ...”

“... to be a novel or a play, only to discover with surprise that it really is an anti-feminist thesis: Harold Owen’s Woman Adrift. It was natural that these pieces, having been written for the Freewoman, should be loaded. In 1915 and 1916, when West was contributing, principally but not exclusively, book reviews to the Daily News, the Liberal paper which, though ...”

“... is the only form your acknowledgment could possibly take (there’s no such thing as a free love). And even this isn’t quite right because the notion of resistance implies that there could be acceptance. Psychoanalysis is, among other things, a redescription of the question, what would it be to accept ourselves and others? It is Freud’s view that we ...”

“... supported it when it was completed. In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, could not stomach the idea of a monarch marrying a twice-divorced woman. The objections, it is said, were moral and religious. The ...”

“... myself) might very well have supposed that Porphyro, when acquainted with Madeline’s love for him ... set himself at once to persuade her to go off with him ... to be married. But, as it is now altered, as soon as M has confessed her love, P instead winds by degrees his arms round her, presses breast to ...”

“... age of myth, he simply worships the goddess. As a man who is driven by his vanity, he finds her love for him immensely gratifying, but not really surprising, so that he can keep his cool. When we see him return to his friends he has urgent news: they may collect their theatrical props and go to the palace at once, but he is bursting to tell them his dream ...”

“... exciting risk of our mutual revelations. Was there a limit between us? Would disgust ever outweigh love?’ Baker would next try for himself the anxious delights of the confessional mode. A compelling and often uncomfortable read, U and I (1991) owns up to an ‘intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration’ for Updike. It also reveals an unexpectedly large gap ...”

“... and the individual talent for the most part with great skill. I suspect that Watson’s greatest love is for the Dissenting or near-Dissenting tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries – Baxter, Charles Wesley, Watts (‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’ receives ten full pages). Though he is generally broad in his sympathies, at one or two moments he ...”

“... new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a Fake, about the Ern Malley hoax, Carey delights in stripping authorship of authority, and in floating the heretical ...”

“... casualties in the first 24 hours of an air attack. ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938,’ Harold Macmillan recalled after the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, ‘rather like people think of nuclear warfare today.’ During Munich week in September 1938, and again in September 1939, when three million people fled London in the first days of the war, many ...”

“... services of a nanny, Erika, 23, buoyant and brave, someone with a real but properly uncompeting love of the children in her care. David, when he’s home, doesn’t regard maleness as disqualifying him from an equal share of chores and caring, even if he does have a knack for sleeping on when the children make demands at night. Dreading his absence ...”

“... de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he ...”

“... pretty that she makes you laugh. I trust no don involved will get litigious For being likened to a love-sick calf – I understand completely how the urge’ll Emerge to call a virgin a new Virgil. A summer madness that began in Spring The Sue Affair’s explained by a don’s life. His winter schedule is a humdrum thing And often the same goes for the don’s ...”

“... Fitzgerald wrote to her daughter Maria in 1974. ‘I wonder if you feel you have a 1st one! But we love you very much and that must count for something.’ To Carduff in 1987 she remarked that ‘on the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.’ In later ...”