“... her role that no one else knew she was only pretending.’ All that spoils the show is her mother, Anne, who embarrasses her and whom she wishes ‘might in some painless way disappear’. She won’t discuss this with Dr Brickner. Rather than illuminate her feelings, she plays with the flashlight.It can’t have been hard for Choi to hit on the title of her ...”

“... women writers who have been picked up will soon be put down again. Seldom do they have any lasting power, or any true or great poetic quality. They are all – especially those who have written in English – more or less failures. Failure is writ large in the case of the archetypal ‘woman poet’, Sappho – a distorted and fragmentary figure who serves ...”

“... of Edmund de la Pole in 1513, of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521, of More and Fisher in 1535, of Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers in 1536, of Thomas Cromwell and the Protestants burned without trial in 1540, of the surviving supporters of Catherine of Aragon and of the Marquis of Exeter in 1540-1, of the Earl of Surrey in 1547. Thomas More, observed ...”

“... On​ their West Country progress in the summer of 1535, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn visited Thornbury Castle near Bristol. Thornbury is an upmarket hotel now, a popular choice for guests working through their bucket list. Now that every narrative is a ‘journey’, TripAdvisor is an illuminating guide to what people expect when they go in search of the past ...”

“... line whose direct descendants have reigned since the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, in 1714; and England had been united with Scotland as the Kingdom of Great Britain in the Union of 1707. Notwithstanding various important extensions after 1832, which widened the electoral franchise, and several additional embellishments, the foundations ...”

“... the Year 1710 was a none too subtle attempt at vindicating her brief period as favourite to Queen Anne, justifying her personal and political roles, refuting slanders against her and her warrior husband, and defaming her enemies, both dead and alive. Through their numerous recensions, Sarah’s memoirs became more rather than less embittered. The slights she ...”

“... grew up the daughters of a conscientious manufacturer who had inherited the estate, wealth and power of a successful Victorian enterprise in a typical well-to-do Ontario town called Port Ticonderoga. The Chase family wealth was based on buttons. (There is a hidden gibe here at Henry James, who in The Ambassadors would not let Strether tell us what was the ...”

“... goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community struggles’: the baddies have their power base among the ‘right-wing Catholic dockers’ and are intent on ‘selling the local community down the river’. They are a ‘handful of right-wingers’ who ‘ruthlessly manipulate the rules’, ‘turn their backs on socialist principles’ and ...”

“... of the screen. The picture snapped with a mobile may be charged with immediacy, but it lacks the power to reflect on the world it so eagerly, even promiscuously records. Or is it that the world ‘out there’ has somehow become invisible, little more than a background to the self? Salt and Silver catalyses such reflections. Oddly enough, after each of my ...”

“... than its antecedents, Reformation Mennonism was a sternly dissentient creed, loathed by Protestant power-brokers, but its puritan radicalism soon eroded into defensive conservatism. Modern Mennonism, like most Protestant confessions, is sharply divided between hardcore traditionalists and liberal modernisers – although to describe any brand of Mennonism as ...”

“... fail at the core. And even as she wrapped its white heat in economic arguments, royal bed, palace power, his, his, his, this! this! this! ultimate sexual casino of stuff and honour and winning, she saw her own apostasy. Too many truths in-between and Hippolytos just one of them, the lovely, careless, wry boy. And maybe that was the reason she killed herself ...”

“... with the Far Left will depend very much on who wins the Deputy Leadership, and what the balance of power on the NEC is. On almost any scenario, the years ahead will be rocky ones. With Hattersley as Deputy, and/or a centre-right NEC, the party will attempt to jettison some of its less popular policies – and this will cause continuing rows and ...”

“... to ‘start from the assumption that the imagination and perceptions of a given period have the power to generate reality.’ The title of her book in the original German edition is Geschichte unter der haut, which Harvard University Press has translated as The Woman beneath the Skin. The implication that where history is, woman is not, and where woman ...”

“... cultivated, public-spirited persons for the rest of time. But Iris Murdoch’s writing has the power to engage the reader in its conflicts, even without the pleasures of recognition or sympathy; and though they are slow in developing, the conflicts are not absent. There are lengthy annexes and excursions that gradually become folded into the main ...”

“... end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind. The rehearsal of all this is painful. Anne Stevenson, against the odds, has written a decent and intelligent book. It is certainly the best book on Sylvia Plath so far – and it isn’t graceless to point out that most of the earlier books have been conspicuously unsatisfactory. But Bitter Fame ...”