“... opinion, some of the worst sins into which women’s poetry was likely to fall: The verse may have been garbled ... the texture of the whole blurred and uneven, but there is still a glimmer of something more than prolixity and conventionality, the track of an intense, unhealthy inner life, the spurious mysticism of love. L.E.L. served this false creed ...”

“... poor things, felt forced to spend hours in educational pursuits in order to please him. He may even have been a child-abuser, ‘approaching’ his daughter Bertha. And Gertrude may have had similar ‘experiences’ with her Uncle Sol, though the details and documentation are not supplied. ‘All Stein wanted was to ...”

“... consider a star biography as merely the linear tale of a performing life’s progress. Rather, we may use star chronicles as springboards for philosophical investigations, however careless and impromptu, into our own sightlines. The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an ...”

“... contradiction between form and content was to have a long after-history: Bernard Shaw’s plays may issue subversive messages, but the loving precision with which their stage directions detail the furniture or the colour of the maid’s stockings suggests a reality too massively solid to be more than tinkered with. These 18th-century utopias exist on the ...”

“... it. It belongs to a now familiar narrative of Empire, in which the lowering of the Union Jack may not always be a happy ending, but is at least a satisfyingly inevitable one. In a recent reply to Clementi, the Hong Kong poet Leung Ping Kwan (in John Minford’s translation) resists the urge to gloat and tempers anger with ruefulness: That rhapsodic ...”

“... plaque in the Père Lachaise cemetery. The narrator looks at a photo left there, and thinks it may represent ‘one of the other dead young men’. A few pages later, recalling his seemingly interminable early sexual adventures, he says: ‘I suppose most of them are dead now, all those young bodies I touched and undressed and tucked in when they fell ...”

“... US – is hard work. And that holds true for both sexes, though the one in shorter supply may well have the more arduous time. The subjects of Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society are fundamentalist Mormons, whose marriages violate both official church doctrine and the laws of the state; but the threat of persecution, legal or otherwise, seems ...”

“... of a reactionary ideology, but this is too simplistic’; ‘the NFWI’s perception of womanhood may have been primarily domestic, but it was not a passive domesticity.’ It is difficult to see why the tone has to be so guarded. Andrews admits that the WI’s founders did not have overtly political ambitions for the organisation and that its executive body ...”

“... Five Points,* convincingly argues that the Bowery Boys gang was neither nativist nor anti-Wood (it may have had Irish members) and that its momentary support of the state police was due to internecine Democratic rivalries – the 1857 riot has been taken to be emblematic of a lawless and brutal era. As with other moments of civil unrest, an extraordinarily ...”

“... England 1660-1800 (1986) – a pioneering study of trends in crime and prosecution in Surrey – may now be seen as a prelude to a masterpiece. Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750 bears all the marks of protracted archival digging followed by mature reflection. Beattie approaches the law and its enforcement as a system with its own internal ...”

“... when viewed from the European perspective Wullschlager consistently invites us to adopt, may seem small beer. This is in part the consequence of a linguistically imposed isolation. The incentives, and indeed the capacity, to translate from Danish were not very great in the 19th century – even Andersen’s works, the one exception, were normally ...”

“... the heroic tale of filial duty, ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the burning deck’). Byron may have been the wrong type of man to find favour among the critics of the 19th century, but Hemans – with what Byron described as her ‘false stilted trashy style which is a mixture of all the styles of the day’ – was the right type of woman. She was ...”

“... to the audience, we become God by proxy, the Delphic oracle that never replies. Soliloquy may be seen, then, not merely as an address, but as speech with an interlocutor who does not respond – as blocked conversation and blocked intention. Again, this may flow from the idea of prayer, especially prayer as the ...”

“... 21st-century readers are likely to deepen and broaden understandings of her poetic project. This may not be printing, but as a form of publishing it is more intimate and shameless than the decorous recensions of Dickinson’s first editors. Franklin’s elaborate editorial apparatus is designed to counter the Editorial Collective’s position, but ends up by ...”

“... parallelism, ‘Here . . . Here . . .’ – continuity with the past. Betty’s cottage may be ‘little’ and ‘weather-stained’, and her ‘unpainted outbuildings . . . bleak’, but what redeems them is her cultivation of the values of her antebellum existence, symbolised by the ‘old-fashioned plants and flowers’ that soften the outlines ...”