“... year his blind daughter, Mary, was born – and suffered from a series of nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my ...”

“... as an unusually bold writer in the Nation pointed out, ‘one more courtier straining to get the king’s ear’. But the Bush administration didn’t need eggheads to euphemise pre-emptive war, torture, rendition and indefinite offshore detention. Bush’s own demotic – ‘We’ll smoke them out,’ ‘wanted dead or alive’, ‘Pretty soon, we’ll have ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... crops up in the dedicatory verses, comparing the mission of Agee and Evans to that of Edgar in King Lear: ‘Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,/Bring your blind father, and describe a little.’ But they are not much like Edgar, not on the scene to show and expound suffering to the sufferers; and one of Agee’s truest points will be ...”

“... relentless. To Beddoes’s friends, it seemed that Stock was burying him all over again. Dr John King, the other, more popular assistant at the Hotwells institution, described Stock as a ‘literary undertaker’; Robert Southey told Coleridge, who told Beddoes’s protégé Humphry Davy, that ‘the proper vignette for the work would be a funeral lamp ...”

“... mix. Conrad’s favourite writer, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird – the real king of Scotland, some say – spent several years in San Antonio, attempting to become a cattle baron, going broke, and then, out of desperation, beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio Express. Stephen Crane ...”

“... Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town perpetrating ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”

“... to expose the relationship.In one respect Murray’s account is less informative than David King Dunaway’s in Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Dunaway, unlike Murray, spoke to Rosalind Bruce Huxley, Leonard’s second wife. Even after seventy years, her recollection was brutal: ‘The girl was village educated in a mild way. It couldn’t have worked. His ...”

“... was acquired for the Duke of Mantua on the recommendation of Rubens (and from Mantua passed to King Charles I). The question of private and public is also of obvious importance for the vexed question of Caravaggio’s homosexuality. His early paintings of boys suggestively half-dressed or undressed, with melting expressions, preparing to play musical ...”

“... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...”

“... wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the three protruding masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that ran aground and broke in two in August 1944, a mile and a half off Sheerness beach. The ship was carrying 1400 tonnes of explosives – enough to wipe Sheerness off the map, along with Southend and parts of the ...”

“... especially the death of Jethro Stone, which is nastier than anything you will find in Stephen King – leave the reader groping for some sort of moral context in which to view them. Nissenson seems to have concentrated all his energies on drawing a portrait of the period so filled with specifics that some echo of the contemporary consciousness, one would ...”

“... left more of the pines and redwoods unfelled, more of the salmon in the rivers and the whales and king-crabs in the seas. People could still entertain a vision of nature as a glorious green possibility because to so much of it there had been little or no change. In spite of his bracing scepticism, Coates concludes: ‘We need a god and nature is a good ...”

“... the advent of sustained war in and from the air. Edith Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’ and Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’ overreach themselves in their attempts to find a rhetorical lift to match the fall of bombs. Keith Douglas was the best of the English Second World War poets because he managed to reconstitute traditional ...”