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“... of postwar hopefulness that things could change. My editor during those excited days of hope, Christopher Falkus at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, asked me to contribute to a book of essays by women on what they thought had shaped them as women. The Virgin Mary was the single most dominant and crucial element in my female life so far, and so I wrote a short piece ...”

“... love. With her ‘Kensington jeweller’s elocution’ and ‘gaze of a demon/Between curtains of black Mongolian hair’, Assia is portrayed simply as dangerous, too foreign and unstable. She is ‘slightly filthy with erotic mystery’ and has nothing like the presence of Plath in the volume.Looking at the letters he wrote to Assia, one may feel that he ...”

“... concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty selection of Heaney’s correspondence, adds disconcertingly: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass”.’ Was it unguarded of Heaney to take such ...”

“... to those who have one without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal ...”

“... as often. The unexceptionably level-headed hermogenean observation (set against the black insanity of family vendetta in Verona) is deliberately put in a form which seems designed to provoke a cratylic response from the more literary listener or reader: ‘If a rose were called a “stink-wort” I’m not sure that it would smell quite as ...”

“... Tory) can put his case lucidly and rationally. But the impression darkens upon reading Christopher Homm, a novel technically interesting in that it proceeds chronologically backwards from its central character’s senility in the opening chapter to his birth in its last, and which I have seen promoted as a major work, but which for me has the ...”

“... ask to see it. A dead mouse I will look at. He says ‘There’s someone else,’ and holds up a black silk glove. I have to wonder how Arthur can be so thick as to prefer his word-processor to delicious Winnie, but then he is merely a fictional example of the general rule that in affairs of the heart boys will be buffoons. A buffoon is the central figure ...”

“... table, McCullers tinkering manically with The Member of the Wedding. One day he breezed into Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica home, and Isherwood was entranced. ‘Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can’t stay awake.’ Isherwood went on to describe the park at ...”

“... has only the faintest of suggestions that we have created him or that he has answered our call. Christopher Lee, in a series of Hammer movies, was dignified and handsome, but far too natty to have come out of anyone’s unconscious. These Hammer films, incidentally, seem now to have acquired a patina of critical respectability, rather as if Sid James, with ...”

“... and Crafts movement shifted aesthetes’ attention away from great houses to country cottages, black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long ...”

“... New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s bibliography. But since ...”

“... his years. Memoirists of his schooldays speak of him as having been almost spookily unboyish. Even Christopher Isherwood, who later on would enjoy noting his friend’s ‘stumpy, immature fingers’ and ‘babyishly shapeless’ ankles, found it hard to view him with full-hearted condescension: ‘I remember him chiefly for ... his smirking, tantalising air ...”

“... their bodies occupied.* They defend McQueen against charges of cruelty, misogyny and racism: the black model Debra Shaw appeared manacled and hobbled, the dancer Shalom Harlow was pelted by paint-spraying robots, models paraded on a constantly tilting floor in a re-enactment of a dance marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke ...”

“... to the ‘vociferous atheists of recent decades’. He is appalled in particular by something Christopher Hitchens wrote: that Huxley ‘cleaned Wilberforce’s clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that’. He points out (‘pace Hitchens’) that contemporary reports suggest Wilberforce wasn’t at all put out. The passage is ...”

“... Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The World is black ashes; – which, ah, when will they grow green? Readers brought up on the cadences of the Old Testament, even on Milton, may have found this easier to respond to than we do. Carlyle’s own prose is rather like the uncontrollable fires it ...”