“... and friars emerge from hiding places to resolve each plot’, he seems to be talking about Anne Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis rather than Shakespeare, and readers of Bishop’s study may be similarly surprised to learn that ‘the figure of the Virgin Mother’ is ‘Shakespeare’s deepest presider over the scene of reunion’. It would be a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... old age don’t have. Just a question, but what if Sylvia Plath were alive and well, along with Anne Sexton, and the two of them met over occasional lunches to tut-tut over the sloppy rearing of their grandchildren? Death, in any case, has a cachet which lends weight to even the featheriest of lives. A cynic might suppose that Lyndall Gordon was fortunate ...”

“... as will be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to compare this book with J.T. Noonan’s Power to Dissolve (1972), a major study of lawyers and marriage cases in the Roman curia which analyses the impact of the canon law system on the individual through a close reading of six cases spread over the period 1653-1923. Most surprising of all, the general ...”

“... English Civil War (not the course of events in the 1640s), the role of party in the time of Queen Anne (not the chronology of her reign), the reasons for the failure of the 1848 Revolutions (not the actual course of the revolutions). History is by its nature a critical, sceptical discipline. Historians commonly see one of their main tasks as puncturing ...”