“... a small Vogue ‘library’, in order to start at the beginning. The beginning. British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats (really quite chic in their way – silver-blue with muscular lines) prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Muir, in his catalogue introduction, points out that Vogue’s inception ...”

“... in one chapter to Burnley, in the next to Barnsley, and poor at sums. He gives the age of Olivier, born in 1907, as 39 when he achieved his triumph as Richard III in 1944. Tarquin Olivier, born in 1936, is credited with a visit at the age of seven to Notley Abbey, bought by his father in 1945. Nor has Holden checked all the ...”

“... He played bridge with his mother’s friends and supplied a local tabloid with gossip. He was born in 1927, and though he came of age during the Depression, the Cohns lived in splendour on Park Avenue. His maternal grandfather, Joseph S. Marcus, an immigrant from Russia, had been a tailor who looked after the savings of other poor New York Jews, keeping ...”

“... in his queering account of Swift, Aileen Douglas on his friendship with women poets, Rebecca Anne Barr on Swift and 18th-century masculinity, Anne Markey on Gaelic echoes in Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts’s placing of what was first published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in ...”

“... 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 ...”