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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Establishmentarians and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot ...”

“... of the goings-on in the home of the third Earl of Portsmouth and his wife of ten years, Mary Anne Hanson. She had for some time been having an affair with William Rowland Alder, a lawyer. The pair abused and mocked Lord Portsmouth, both physically and mentally, even making him a spectator to their fornication. These details came to light through a legal ...”

“... descendant Rupert Campbell-Black in his office ‘in the west wing of the same pale gold Queen Anne house’. The loving description of this and other country houses in the earlier books reflects the cultural and political changes of the last fifty years, changes which among other things brought about the marketisation of the English house as a design ...”

“... bound to a stake. Volatility in this book is left to King Henry, tantrums and petty revenge to Anne Boleyn, sulks and tactlessness to Stephen Gardiner, fuming at upstart nobodies to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell, without title and for a long time without proper position, moved quietly ever forward. It all​ began in Putney, a few miles upriver ...”

“... speculates in a similar vein about the later and sunnier correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s teasingly ...”