“... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William ...”

“... William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos were among the last hurrahs of the postwar literary era dominated by ...”

“... be cancelled who knows when ... ?”, if we cannot radically alter our relationships with public power; but neither a transformed nor a reformed public realm will be worth having if individual creative values do not flourish, indeed fructify in abundance for the majority of people, not just for the chosen or even the self-chosen few ... ’ Crick often ...”

“... myths for what they revealed about the human psyche, he was experiencing the speculative, oracular power of these materials. His view still holds very widely. While myths might be narrative fossils from unimaginably long ago – astonishingly, there is only one mention of anyone reading or writing anything in Homer – they offer themselves to us as rich ...”

“... Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is one great-great-granddaughter, and the former Queen Anne-Marie of Greece is another. To describe him as well connected would be something of an understatement. But none of this helps in explaining who Prince Arthur actually was, what he accomplished, or why – if at all – he still matters. From his birth in ...”

“... an impasse, situations from which there was no way out being best-suited to human need. Gurov and Anne in ‘The Lady with the Dog’ end up in that position, which is also one brought about and continued by their love. Like ceremony, love cannot bring things off. When Olga Knipper finally got him to the altar Chekhov besought her not to have a wedding ...”

“... and inspiration. Significantly, the poets got there first; and later it was a younger poet, Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about Bishop. One wonders if this helped or hindered the advancement of her reputation where such things are decided. To have been taken up by Jarrell, crying with such operatic hauteur in the wilderness and making no ...”

“... were less striking than the continuing tenacity of the grim reaper. Fond parents William and Anne Gossip of Thorp Arch watched eight of their 11 offspring die, four of them before the age of two. If they nonetheless picked themselves up and kept going, this was not because familiarity with the fragility of life bred impassivity. Rather, bereaved parents ...”

“... with her dramatic looks, wiry black hair, white skin, dark eyes. The character in the novel, Anne, partly based on herself, describing her grief after the death of her first husband, says: ‘But I remained under in my underworld. Nothing in this life had remotely the power that darkness had.’ The book was written ...”

“... a poet to be serious and to sparkle at the same time, but Stallings is one of the few. (I think of Anne Carson’s translation of Aphrodite’s epithet ποικιλόθρον as ‘of the spangled mind’.) It’s not only that she renders works like Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in rhyming fourteeners with gamesome finesse, and makes grumpy Hesiod’s Works ...”

“... and paedophile (much like Fiona Benson’s Zeus in Vertigo & Ghost), a sexual predator whose power is thinly veiled: ‘don’t you want God/To want you?’ At the end of the poem, Brown abandons the language of myth to speak directly about slavery: ‘No one has to convince us./The people of my country believe/We can’t be hurt if we can be ...”

“... own series of ‘great alterations’ by appointing him lord chancellor. For those close to power in Tudor England, the ground underfoot was never secure.Much of the fascination of this tumultuous period consists in what we don’t, rather than what we do, know. There are large gaps in the documentary record, and what survives is often ...”

“... Meyers, having secured the story for himself thanks to the co-operation of Morrison’s daughter Anne, has allowed it to skew his biography. Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap operas. Anne Morrison, he writes, still bitter about some aspects of her childhood, feels Kay hurt other people ...”

“... rewriting the history of the Bolshevik underground in Baku, and brooding on the ‘technology of power’: ‘A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the people.’ Oderint dum metuant, in other words. The novel ends with the assassination in December 1934 of the ...”

“... social fabric that holds Britain’s cities together is fraying. New technologies of transport and power become slings for catapulting homes and industry clear of the tangled inner city. Reinforced by an improvident structure of taxation, these forces conspire to undermine civic leadership and create the moral vacuum familiar at the core of today’s ...”