“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of Bishop’s letters to Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares were destroyed, as were her letters to Marjorie Carr Stevens, with whom she lived in Key West in ...”

“... troubling when Hardwick is writing about real people. For Plath, ‘suicide is an assertion of power, of the strength – not the weakness – of the personality. She is no poor animal sneaking away, giving up; instead she is strong, threatening, dangerous.’ Nor is Hardwick afraid to pit Plath’s suicide against that of another female writer: ‘When ...”

“... for Wachsmann’s magisterial history of the concentration camps. Soon after​ Hitler came to power in January 1933, tens of thousands of people, mainly communists and socialists, were taken into ‘protective custody’ as enemies of the state by a variety of party and state organisations. By the end of the year 200,000 had been held. This was made ...”

“... a negative check. The positive claims of Ginzburg’s micro-history, however, rest on the power of the anomaly. For what micro-history could reveal, as illustrated dramatically in The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, was the existence of worlds undreamed of in standard versions of the past, challenging their easy acceptance. Still, the ...”

“... of exposition. The lawyer Coen needs legal and financial documentation from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called ...”

“... rivers or the great collisions of rivers and oceans, that have clung to my memory with tenacious power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash ...”

“... in Z (1969), his thriller about the turmoil in Greece, where a military junta had recently seized power. The FLN agreed a co-production deal. It had also put up money for Klein’s documentary and for Monangambeee, which was approved for release a few months after the festival. ‘Having screened the film,’ the official report went, ‘the Department of ...”

“... inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of him. He couldn’t see it for its ubiquity. Here was the distinctive architecture of its time, derived from countless precedents, with ...”

“... at the University of California, San Diego. Dick said near the end of his life that he was ‘into power’: ‘Instead of society moulding me,’ he claimed, ‘I mould it.’ His late belief in his own visionary importance puts into new, sad light the schlubby repairmen, newspaper-puzzle obsessives and helpless Organisation Men in Dick’s earlier ...”

“... her from Trump, and from the politician with whom she is most often compared, Thatcher. Anne Jenkin, who helped set up Women2Win with May, says of the two: ‘Thatcher was the outsider. She was a man’s woman, and that was the secret of her success. She liked men; she liked men more than she liked women. And I don’t think that’s the case with ...”

“... Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is wearing several of them in ...”

“... jumped forwards in time. Lansley has not yet, supposedly, shaken up the NHS. He’d barely been in power a year when I talked to Porter. But here was a leading surgeon in an NHS hospital, about to perform a challenging operation on an NHS patient, telling me exactly how much money the hospital was going to lose by operating on her, and chatting easily about ...”

“... wrote, ‘by how many mentioned in almost the same breath’ the Ford machinists’ strike and Anne Koedt’s ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, which was doing the rounds ‘on ill-typed roneoed sheets’ in the early 1970s. ‘The startling disparity between the two catalysts … is more apparent than real. Women clearly sensed that the two were part ...”

“... pleasure that there is in life itself’. Even her hesitations reassure them. (‘Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself?’) The immediacy in every phrase still shoots at us – the ding dong of the Rodmell church bells outside the window, coming between her and the words as she writes, and so clambering into ...”