“... de Prat de Lamartine was born in 1790 to aristocratic parents in Mâcon in Burgundy, fifty miles north of Lyon. An only son with five younger sisters, he was a bright, restless adolescent, running away from one school and fathering a child by a servant at the Jesuit college he went to next. He was often intensely bored and discovered early that ...”

“... family in Portsmouth. It is worth remembering that these were the years when, further to the north, Wordsworth was fascinated by starving children, beggars, aged shepherds and broken veterans of the French war. Copeland, whose essay in Jane Austen in Context is accompanied by others of comparable value and interest, turns up again as the editor of Sense ...”

“... proportional representation and where there is not, the political reflexes on which the parties in north-western Europe have relied are breaking down. There would seem to be a change in the interests which these parties have presumed and been presumed to reflect. What these interests have been presumed to be is, in general, clear. On the right, they have been ...”

“... starts to look a little shaky. All is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a ...”

“... Wagner-Martin, a highly respected scholar of American literature who teaches at the University of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw ...”

“... in 1908, is given as much consideration as Pound’s other early friend William Carlos Williams; Marianne Moore, who matriculated at Bryn Mawr in the same year as H.D., is barely mentioned. Snippets of truly mediocre poetry by Lowell, Flint, Fletcher et al sit cheek by jowl with the masterly experiments of Pound and H.D. For all the joie de vivre of these ...”

“... In fact the élitist refinement of the United Irish Society insulated it from such realities. Marianne Elliott does not mince words in saying that it had ‘an instinctive fear of the people’. Hence its main practical tenet: that Ireland’s liberty could only be achieved with French assistance. This belief produced the odd relationship which is ...”

“... live in reasonable comfort as a single woman. There was a spirited daughter of this failed union, Marianne, who had been crippled as an infant: the story went that she had jumped from a window to greet her mother. Marianne was around twenty years old when her aunt died in London. ‘Poor little Elizabeth! what will become ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... literary criticism. In it are essays of varying degrees of rigour: a serious discussion of Marianne Moore, an illuminating passage on Wordsworth’s ‘thinking hart’, a goofy anecdote about Wallace Stevens. (Harvard asked her for a yearbook quote; she gave them ‘Let be be finale of seem.’ ‘Well what is that supposed to mean?’ they ...”

“... 1916’, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’; and reviewed Ulysses, Marianne Moore (by T.S. Eliot), Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude Stein, Pirandello, Hemingway and Al Jolson. Just about the only body of avant-garde work that was missing was that of the Russians, from whom the Dial shied away because of the editors’ cautious ...”

“... his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the curriculum and methodologies these expanding ...”

“... be an adverb unless it ends in -ly. There seems no other reason for him to write ‘overly’, a North American usage I always find overly ripe. Stylistically, he is at his most infuriating when his needle keeps jumping back a groove or gets stuck in one he can’t escape. He is subject to a nervous tic of writing ‘as we have seen’ when all he can ...”

“... that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was Douglas Crase’s The Revisionist. Out of print for almost forty years, it has now been reissued (Carcanet, £12.99) in a volume that also includes Crase’s only other collection of verse – a slim ...”

“... a contralto who made her name in Berlin, becomes Paulinka Bimbam; her maternal grandparents, Marianne Benda and Ludwig Grunwald, are ‘Dr and Mrs Knarre … a couple’. Alfred Wolfsohn is ‘Amadeus Daberlohn … a voice teacher’. Charlotte Kann (left) and Barbara Petzel discuss Barbara’s love life Salomon’s parents were well-to-do. Her ...”