“... Catherine’s summer trips to Tunbridge Wells and Bath, where it was hoped the therapeutic waters would help her to conceive, were gossiped about, as were rumoured miscarriages. One report claimed she had miscarried after Charles’s pet fox had jumped on her bed. In not producing an heir, Catherine was perceived to have failed in a queen consort’s ...”

“... cape of hair as proudly as if she were carrying upon it an enormous pot full of all the waters of Lethe.’ But here the reaching for effect is itself a calculated effect, for Angela Carter is mocking Baudelaire as well as imitating him. Her book is warmer and more human than Nightwood by virtue of being satirical, with a recognisable purpose that ...”

“... II, but also, in their hysterical or dreamlike quality, to that of Wonderland, with Arthur as Alice and his big-wig literary friends – Thomas Hardy and Henry James at the Athenaeum – as mad Queens. It seems now that no one could live Benson’s supremely cushioned existence. Apart from occasional guarded forays into London literary society and royal ...”

“... the First World War, the European high aristocracy roamed freely across the continent, taking the waters at Baden-Baden, sampling the sea air at Biarritz, shooting partridge and pheasant at Sandringham, and coming together for grand balls and funerals in virtually every European capital. With so many occasions on which to meet, and so much disdain for those ...”

“... Home Secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, had to journey to Glamis Castle and wait for 16 days for the waters to break. He passed the time profitably enough being shown around the local estates by Lady Airlie, a lady-in-waiting, who was pleased to find ‘under his homely exterior a deeply sensitive mind, touchingly appreciative of beauty’. In the company of the ...”

“... its back on, all that it leaves out when it comes to what art can be.’ As it pans the miasmic waters where the Chapman Brothers, Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and of course Damien Hirst loom, High Art Lite finds the ark of art occupied, betrayed and shipwrecked. The principles that gave the avant-garde of the earlier part of the 20th century its energy and ...”

“... pay for carting cargo he was given a barrel of raisins, which he managed to sell for 35 shillings. Alice Mathews did a steady trade, buying a jar of oil for four shillings, and selling a pound of wool for two shillings sixpence ‘to a stranger gentleman’. Profit was important, but so was speed. The sooner goods could be sold or swapped or spirited to a ...”

“... called a ‘Red Queen’ process – ‘it takes all the running you can do,’ she explains to Alice, ‘to stay in the same place.’ Ever the obsessive, Hamilton developed a parasite-dominated vision of the natural world. He suggested that even the bright colours of birds were produced by parasite pressure. A female bird choosing her mate among males is ...”

“... fiction, McGahern wasn’t especially interested in exploring his own psyche. He rowed in familiar waters because the cadences in the prose and the resonant images came more naturally to him. And it was cadence and image that energised him, not self-revelation. In a letter from 1960, before he had published anything, he wrote: ‘The common notion that you can ...”

“... teeming and steady, just as I like it’.In her introduction​ to Travels in the Americas, Alice Kaplan writes that, thanks to the dispatches of Sartre and other French writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North ...”

“... word,’ Humpty Dumpty says, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’ Alice is puzzled by this, but Humpty Dumpty explains: ‘The question is … which is to be master – that’s all.’ The term that is successfully imposed will occupy the field of meaning: calling the work of writing a book ‘generating an output’ or a ...”

“... in Macbeth, though not happening in Scotland in the remote past, but now, today, in the murky waters of present-day politics where the ceremony of innocence – a baptism in fetid fonts – is drowned in obscene shouts: Heil Hitler! Evviva Il Duce! Viva Fidel! The Beast is full of passionate intensity – while the best not only lack the right convictions ...”

“... on the reeds of myth by forgotten streams … Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?’ The passage is wonderfully facetious, but at the same time it manages momentarily to smuggle into this remorseless world, by the duplicity of a joke, just the sort of transcendent feelings evoked by Rossetti’s pictures.Reviewers were not slow to ...”

“... the tender blossoming of fat – fat cropped in the bud – taken in the shoot.When my mouth waters – I’ve always had a soft spot for crackling – Lamb and I are unitive, joined across the gulf of death by that most transient thing: a flavour.The desire to dodge the plain facts of existence informed Lamb’s appreciation for the theatre, which he ...”

“... care of yourself,’ Imani’s husband, Clarence, says as he puts her on a plane to New York in Alice Walker’s story ‘The Abortion’. ‘Yes, she thought. I see that is what I have to do.’ She has the procedure, alone, in an ‘assembly line’ clinic. And the marriage unravels from that moment.This isn’t Imani’s first abortion. Walker’s ...”