“... Mother’, Inglis shows how, by the middle of the 19th century, the mother came to represent the power of the Church in the home. Deprived of economic power, she was given immense moral authority. ‘The way for the mother to obtain the priest’s blessing and approval was to bring up her children within the limits that he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it. Her art becomes recognisable when her crisply social novels take on a formidable and elusive power of suggestion: the prosaic grew poetic in them, and the poetic grew hard. The chief medium for these continual transactions of inner and outer was her vital irony. When Jane Austen said that she depended on her readers’ ingenuity, she meant something not ...”

“... waggoners and ostlers – company that certainly energised his writing. During the reign of Queen Anne, when he briefly walked the corridors of power, he looked in one view like a Whig in Ireland but a Tory in England, in another like a Whig in politics but a Tory in religion. Even these identities were unstable. A pamphlet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cannot be escaped, a lesson she herself ascribed to the influence of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power: ‘The mythical is not something “extra”; we live in myth and symbol all the time’ (Spectator, 7 September 1962). So the novelist is engaged in a half-paradoxical enterprise: she is to tell stories in order to free us from myth and magic. But free us ...”

“... through Jesus Christ that the stones and beams of our houses would sing hallelujah.The expressive power of the sequence derives not just from lyricism but from the anguish of what is withheld.‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’ is bundled together with two other sequences, ‘Thorow’ and ‘Scattering as Behaviour towards Risk’, establishing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”