“... keep silent? Might they be able to prophesy if they wore a veil? These agonised questions from the first years of Christian history have plenty of modern echoes. The presence of strong-minded and wealthy widows in the early Church caused much anxiety, especially over whether or not they should remarry. Instructions from third-century Syria insisted that widows ...”

“... spread like Alpine plants over the rock-like social assurance of its betters. At the end of this first volume the hero is still under thirty, with a long and droll career, presumably at least as well documented, still before him. Long biographies are in fashion, and the serious case for this one must be that Betjeman’s influence on insular taste really has ...”

“... fair to Graves, from whom we get two untypical letters – one to Alan Sillitoe, the other to Ruth Fainlight – of the sort that we might expect from a master instructing neophytes. To Sillitoe for example, in 1954: Your poem sounds good, holds together well, but the language has been taken a stage beyond common sense, and that I always regret. A poem ...”

“... and successful call-girls), but’ are vividly informative. This is what I have learned from them. First, how it all starts: usually little by little, not difficult to imagine (‘each time I realised that it was really impossible to stop. Yet it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I did, from the start’). Only one out of the six set out with any ...”

“... when he went up to Cambridge in 1938, he intended to become a medical missionary, and met his first wife, Ruth Harris, at Congsoc (the University Congregational Society). Soon she was ‘washing his test tubes’ and they were tacitly engaged, though they wouldn’t have sex until 1943, when they got married.Early in ...”

“... and it is here that the most uninhibited comedy is to be found. The high point is the career of Ruth, the plain, solid girl who became a nun. Even she gets restless, and is sent by her order to America, where for a spell she pursues her vocation among encounter groups, rock masses, charismatic prayer meetings and all the Southern Californian varieties of ...”

“... do very much better if they are to win a general election. The Tories still have two problems. The first is to find issues on which they differ from Labour. They have persistently let Labour off the hook because they largely agree with Labour’s more unpopular policies. Unfortunately for them they have little choice here. To disagree with Labour on such ...”

“... intellectually and morally when called on to respond to the customs of other races. They failed, first, to consider the possibility that practices which appeared to them to be oppressive might not actually be so; second, to understand that ‘modes of femininity’ (a felicitously non-judgmental expression) cannot in themselves be held to indicate the level ...”

“... inactive – and the pressure to do something may include violent and murderous acts – then the first thing to do is to locate this attitude in its contemporary context. The same holds for the Christian anti-abortion movement, who also find it ‘impossible to remain silent’ in the face of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foetuses every year, a ...”

“... to which she used them as vital elements in her psychodrama. Anne Stevenson deftly begins her first chapter with such a moment. Sylvia, aged 14, was highly praised by her English teacher for a group of poems, including particularly one called ‘I thought that I could not be hurt’. ‘Incredible,’ said a fellow teacher, ‘that one so young could have ...”

“... to Rodin’ show in the United States last year. The catalogue for this provides the first good general discussion of French 19th-century sculpture in English yet published, unless one counts the excellent but very much shorter piece by Ruth Butler (then Mirolli) in the catalogue of the similar but smaller ...”

“... of offence by a charming mixture of passionate concern and playful delight in irony. There is first the obvious irony that, in a peripeteia worthy of the Deuteronomist, he has turned the tables on those who denied the existence of the gods of other religions. But he is aware also of the irony that all he says about the Bible could be applied to his own ...”

“... limb: ‘The inexperienced dismemberer, and let’s face it most of us are, will probably attempt first to cut through the long bones. If they do, they will very swiftly find that this is an extremely difficult task. It requires the right tools, plenty of time, a suitable location and a good deal of stamina.’ The entry following ‘dismemberment’ is ...”

“... to one than I was obliged to try on another. Seduced by a pretty cover, I picked up Rachel Ingalls first. Three of a Kind contains, as one might expect, three stories, each with a tendency to run to fifty pages, although one falls short. The first of them bears the ominous title ‘I see a long journey’, and game for ...”

“... Singer and, in the most recent Zuckerman novel, Henry Roth. But Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud’s first biographer, persuasively argues that the house, the wife, the joylessness and the drive are all echt Malamud. ‘If you think of me sitting at my desk, you can’t be wrong,’ Malamud once wrote to a friend he would not make the time to see. He had little ...”