“... obsession of his biographer and son-in-law, the British botanist turned racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain); and the outbreak of the First World War, which shattered the cosmopolitanism of Bayreuth and saw Wagner’s characters enlisted on behalf of the ‘Holy German War’. Soldiers deployed under Operation Alberich in 1917 scrambled for control ...”

“... her companions in the new Berg Women’s Series, Mme de Stael and Emily Dickinson.* Unfortunately Susan Goodman’s book is somewhat unbalanced, sloppily written (‘her heart over brimmed with romance’), littered with irritating errors and grammatical infelicities, falling far short of the standard set for the series by Renée Winegarten’s excellent ...”

“... incestuous, family. What if Laura Hunt – Gene Tierney from Laura – met George Bailey, James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life? Thomson treats the film characters as real people with disorienting, almost vertigo-inducing results. So Sally, Susan Sarandon’s wholesome oyster-shucking waitress in Atlantic City, becomes ...”

“... three weeks after the film won an Academy Award. It was signed by Mike Leigh, Pedro Almodóvar, Susan Sarandon and others. At the opening ceremony the next day, Juliette Binoche took centre stage. Her outfit, an off-white crepe ensemble, had apparently taken couturiers at Dior – whose parent company, LVMH, invests hundreds of millions in Israeli ...”

“... writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The ...”

“... In a couple of years more, he had done The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, Barry, Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, who got an Oscar). Only then did he make his first Hitchcock film, Suspicion (1941), as a rascal intent on killing his wife (the lovely, grand but slightly fatuous Joan Fontaine – she got an Oscar, too). Some of these films may not be as good as the ...”

“... value in returning to these early modern women is to see more clearly the deep roots of what Susan Watkins calls ‘anti-discrimination feminism’ – the kind of feminism that looks at the status quo and asks only how the best-off women can get a foot in the door.Penaluna is aware that not everyone will identify as she did with the four women she ...”

“... and Shippey has turned up this, from a campus novel called A Memorial Service by J.I.M. Stewart:‘A sad case,’ [the Regius Professor] concluded unexpectedly.‘Timbermill’s, you mean?’‘Yes, indeed. A notable scholar, it seems. Unchallenged in his field. But he ran off the rails somehow, and produced a long mad book – a kind of apocalyptic ...”