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“... aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”

“... associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San Francisco that Smith O’Brien, one of the leaders of the abortive uprising of 1848, was the ‘earliest hero of my childhood’, and he said that he had been trained by his mother to love and reverence the Fenians ‘as a Catholic child is the saints of the ...”

“... was a major form. Forgotten now, or doomed to be read only by critics, books like Miss Severn’s Anne Hathaway; or, Shakespeare in Love enjoyed mass appeal in Victorian England. One fatuous confection by Robert Folkestone Williams, The Youth of Shakespeare, went through six editions in three countries, besides being translated into German, and the author was ...”

“... had been living but from whom she had separated, had an affair with one of his art students, Anne Lindholm. She became pregnant, and, after much soul-searching, had an abortion. Feelings ran high on all sides. Davies complained that Anne was ‘lazy, unstimulating, cowlike’. She found the termination traumatic; she ...”

“... of the superhuman role she was required to fulfil. When I think of Diana, I remember Stevie Smith’s poem about the Lorelei:There, on a rock majestical,A girl with smile equivocal,Painted, young and damned and fair,Sits and combs her yellow hair.Soon Diana’s hairstyles were as consequential as Marie Antoinette’s, and a great deal cheaper to copy.In ...”

“... advice any filmmaker has ever given to another filmmaker. Thank God he didn’t listen to me.’ Anne Bohlen, one of his producers, noticed from the beginning the implausible charisma he had on screen. ‘Michael can pump up, he can project on screen. Performing is about timing and Michael has very good timing.’ The films continue to be comforting, thanks ...”

“... matter, deeply cumbersome and difficult to interpret. The Original Rules of Rugby, edited by Jed Smith, curator of the Museum of Rugby at Twickenham, reprints the two key documents drawn up during the early years of the game, the first in 1845 at Rugby school, and the second in 1871 by the Rugby Football Union. In the interval, two things had ...”

“... informality of ‘almost’ seeks to modify and excuse the sentimental literariness of the rest. Anne Rouse, another young American with a first book, is in every way a better writer than Clary. She is civil and efficient and the only problem with her writing is that it resembles the civil efficiencies of a thousand others. Killarney Clary forgets too ...”

“... has been much huffing and puffing – not least in the catalogue essays by Simon Martin and Anne Chisholm – about Carrington’s sexuality. In her introduction, Ali Smith says simply that she was ‘unpindownable’, which seems right. She slept with men and women, describing herself as something between ‘a ...”

“... Cavendish, whose ‘wits were turned with solitude and freedom’, the obscure and melancholy Anne Finch, Elizabeth Carter, ‘the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek’, and of course her own creation, the mute inglorious poet buried opposite the Elephant and Castle, Shakespeare’s ...”

“... Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we study it, the map changes and discloses a larger ...”

“... Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate to authorise a biography of T.S. Eliot is a British cultural scandal as were the impediments put ...”

“... eye. ‘Between the ANC and oblivion stood the lone and battered figure of Winnie Mandela,’ Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob wrote in Winnie Mandela: A Life (2004). The pathos of individual heroism became a defining feature of Winnie Mandela’s life, but the same was true of the ANC, a moribund organisation until the freedom fighters of the Soweto ...”

“... in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins ...”

“... virulent, as well as being frequently obscene and licentious. The reigns of William III and Queen Anne were marked by intense political partisanship, and the language used in attacks on government and parliament provoked retaliation. The Stamp Duty Act of that year caused Swift to lament ‘that all Grub Street is ruined.’ This was an exaggeration. The ...”