“... Field’ includes the line: ‘Robespierre and Stalin mostly killed people they knew.’ In ‘Anne Boleyn’: ‘There was a whiteness to Anne Boleyn’s throat.’The sonnets in The Dolphin are more melancholy, more hushed and personal. The iambic beat becomes less strident and mechanical; its structure is in subtle ...”

“... of the far right – and it isn’t something to be feared, much less resisted. Rather, it’s born of a marriage (arranged, of course) between a rudderless political establishment and a peaceful Islamist party. The Muslim Fraternity is led by Ben Abbes, a Muslim de Gaulle (Houellebecq’s comparison) who towers above his rivals. Houellebecq says his novel ...”

“... This is not a model which denies poetic development. Yet, by arguing that ‘when a new reality is born and exerts its pressure on poets, their resisting pressure of language and imagination generates a new poetic,’ Vendler limits the development of ‘poetry’ (steadily elided with ‘lyric’) to a re-negotiation of the self’s relationship with shifting ...”

“... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...”

“... Joyn’d/That make an Ass prodigious and refin’d;/A Lump deform’d, and shapeless wert thou born.’ Scroope, Rochester suggests, is a mathematical impossibility, a collection of human ‘halves’ that refuse to add up to a human whole:But thy halfe witt will ne’re let Thee be wise:Halfe witty, and halfe mad, and scarce halfe brave,Halfe ...”

“... about the Revolutionary women themselves. Figures who do not quite fit – like Marat’s printer, Anne Félicité Colombe, or Louise Kéralio, a radical but middle-class journalist – are forever consigned to the footnotes; and we are no nearer to being able to imagine the day-today life of the ordinary woman. Godineau wonders if, in the field of ...”

“... Eleanor to the depression that helped precipitate her husband’s affair. After her last child was born and Franklin had that affair, Eleanor entered a female community. It was the turning-point of her life. She formed friendships with independent women social activists, some of whom lived sexual lives together. (One of these couples co-owned her Hyde Park ...”

“... Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind him, the Macedonian defence minister just beside him, the Macedonian soldiers in front of him, looking ...”

“... as well.Geoffrey Paul, her father, was a missionary in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, where Paul was born in 1959. She was the fourth daughter, and for a while the youngest. Then another sister, Kate, came along. Paul found this very hard to bear, as she describes with raw honesty, trusting her readers’ sympathy. ‘I refused to eat. I became really ill and ...”

“... into my stomach like a sword-swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and god-like’?After Anne Stevenson’s, Janet Malcolm’s and Jacqueline Rose’s battles to get the archives opened, and the passing of the copyright to Frieda Hughes, Sylvia’s daughter, we now have the unabridged journals, the restored text of Ariel and these two new volumes of ...”

“... in haste’, as he put it. They quarrelled and parted within months of the ceremony and Karl was born at Straiton, outside Edinburgh, to an effectively single mother. She passed him on to her own mother and her mother’s sisters in nearby Gilmerton, a working-class family whose older generation had worked in the pits of the Lothian coalfield around ...”

“... centre of “the King’s English” (Merry Wives, 1.4.5) (Chapter 2) and “the true-born Englishman” (Richard II, 1.3.273).’The result is challenging to read – there aren’t many sentences in Shakespeare’s Englishes which deploy fewer inverted commas and parentheses and references than the one I’ve just quoted – but ...”

“... Chicago love affair to the political tribulations of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for ...”

“... that they are going to stay young for ever – or perhaps they think the old and the young are born that way. The only defence against them is also a kindness: silence and knowledge. Even if we don’t take the Stoics to heart and live every moment as if it were our last, we should try to mitigate the awful shock that comes later on when we can’t fail to ...”

“... courtship, and men like Page in The Merry Wives sought to keep away fortune-hunters. The well-born but impecunious Fenton tells Anne Page that her father holds it ‘a thing impossible/I should love thee but as a property’, as though she walked about Windsor like stamped coin in sealed bags. Maus shows that these ...”