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“... of the story’. The burning question became not how or whether science can usurp the deity’s power of bestowing life on inanimate matter, but as Mary Shelley was so frequently asked, ‘how I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea’. Where the 1818 preface spoke dismissively of ‘a mere tale of spectres or ...”

“... death in 1878. Presumably, Kemble had no intention of publishing the ‘Answer of Frances Anne Butler to the Libel of Pierce Butler Praying for Divorce’, but this narrative, too, became public when the newspapers got hold of copies in the midst of the couple’s protracted divorce negotiations in 1848. The Butler marriage was one of those unions ...”

“... at the intersection between the real and the imagined … Intense, erotic, incandescent in the power and beauty of its prose, T.PB is an astonishing achievement.’ Jeanette Winterson generally writes her own jacket copy. If you hadn’t already guessed. Inside, there’s an entity called Ali who lives in Spitalfields, East London: ‘The sign on the shop ...”

“... been true: many poets have discovered many different keys to unlock certain doors. For emotional power, Thomas Wyatt, circa 1536: From depth of sin, and from a deep despair, From depth of death, from depth of heart’s sorrow, From this deep cave, of darkness deep repair, Thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow. Thou in my voice, O Lord, perceive and ...”

“... Mary, little bright-necked one; get them, sun of women, from your son who has them in his power.’ Her worship has taken many forms, not just artistic and liturgical but acrobatic: a lay brother at the monastery of Clairvaux, who had joined not knowing the liturgy, offered his praises to Mary by walking about on his hands at night, while his brethren ...”

“... and Economic Relations of English and American Quakers, 1750-85,’ completed a decade earlier by Anne T. Gary, an American pursuing a doctorate in modern history at Oxford.A Barclays publicist responded a few days later. ‘David Barclay formed a committee of London Quakers to oppose the slave trade, and later became involved with the committee in taking the ...”

“... parliamentary elections – by lending tacit support to the FLN in its successful bid to stay in power. In 1993, the PLO signed up to the Oslo Accords, which promised Palestinians a pitiful slice of their territory in return for peace. Arafat concurred. Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister and Israel’s broker at Oslo, was murdered in Tel Aviv in 1995. The ...”

“... follow-through, is the most balletic stroke the sport has ever seen – but in an era dominated by power baseliners, some commentators thought it insufficiently muscular. In 2003, he claimed his first Wimbledon title, losing only a single set over the entire tournament. Two years later (when Niland was playing matches on the Futures tour with ‘literally ...”

“... cruel.’‘The matter of your work is yours entirely and I don’t think you have it in your power to “hurt” me,’ Hardwick herself told Lowell. ‘I mean that I cannot see what harm can come to me from a poem by you. Why should I care?’ It seemed, however, that she did care. Bidart – who had answered Lowell’s call for help and spent time with ...”

“... life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely defined by her relationship to men, the first thing he says by way of conversation is to tell her what colour her hair is. ‘Your hair’s red,’ he says. ‘There are blondes ...”

“... December 1792, and it is significant that she took her father’s name – or something like it: Anne-Caroline Wordswodsth. Annette’s two surviving letters (confiscated by the French police in March 1793, and rediscovered in 1922) are garrulous, loving, illiterate, and plead again and again for her ‘cher Williams’ to come back soon and marry ...”

“... and his household, by the Republic of Gilead, and – more broadly – by the change in sexual power-relationships brought about by a catastrophic decline in the birth-rate. Earthquakes, nuclear pollution, Agent Orange, an AIDS epidemic and a new strain of venereal disease have combined to bring about a drastic reduction in human fertility (surely a ...”

“... the target’s target, the loved one’s love. I find a description of all this, surprisingly, in Anne Carson’s study of Greek lyric poetry, Eros the Bittersweet: Possibilities are projected onto a screen of what is actual and present by means of the poet’s tactic ... That godlike self, never known before, comes into focus and vanishes again in one quick ...”

“... than any of their owner’s paintings, which included Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, to which it would probably be impossible to assign a monetary value today (the Mona Lisa is uninsured for just that reason). And tapestries –‘which seem today to enjoy about the same esteem as secondhand clothing’ – outclassed paintings in the ...”

“... achieved, as Bratton drily glosses, with ‘a simple code of conformity glorifying physical power, simplicity of speech and mind, softness of feeling, and self-satisfaction with the state not of manliness, but of being a boy’. Again, we must bear fashion in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest ...”