“... or nothing at all? ‘Love I laugh to scorn,’ says one of Emily’s poems, and the ‘strange power’ longed for in another is the power of, and for, annihilation. Neither God nor love is in question, but food, or the absence of it, is: a substance both obsessive and despised. Heathcliff is the tyrant of the ...”

“... audience’s concern with, and resistance to, the forms of knowledge, distinction, difference, power and communication that shape their world. How, if at all, can art remake the ruling order? Can that order be forced to appear? What sorts of freedom do humans possess? Do we mean what we say? Can art trump speech? Can it change or erase what people ...”

“... one with a wistful ending, rather than a major literary work. But those withering comments have power. I was struck by one passage in particular. Writing about the evil older brother’s ‘cold, insulting’ violence, Duras notes that the young woman’s family avoid looking at and talking to one another: It’s a family of stone, petrified into a ...”

“... and with the least smoke. It is black or steel grey, brilliant, and clean to touch. It used to power the Great Western Railway, and before gas-fired central heating became widespread, was a popular choice for domestic heating, because it produces little smoke or dust.Coal has less orthodox uses, too. In a memoir written with her friend and fellow activist ...”

“... learned, un-showily stylish and at times moving in their tender intelligence, these essays by Anne Barton, ranging from a richly ‘mellow’ piece first published in 1953 – a period when even undergraduates wrote as if they were middle-aged – to the magnificent ‘Wrying a Little’, on Cymbeline, Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are ...”

“... was talking about the guy on the bus or the boys on the corner. They spoke instead about men in power, especially at work, the feeling that what was violated was not their body, but their gift. The men fired in America were men who sexualised their dominance. They used sex to spoil women’s ambition and soil their talent. You might even say they were using ...”

“... much by men as by women, and that shifts in the wider economy might produce shifts in bargaining power in the division of labour within households. Nor do they examine some of the implications of their assertion that, while more and more wives go out of the home to earn, their domestic and public status remains largely unaltered. They show that ...”

“... eloquent among themselves’. The story has two heroines, both called Kate, but Jacobs calls one Anne for clarity. His version is only two pages long in the 1968 Bodley Head edition. The telling moves off at a spanking pace: Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, as in many lands have been. The king had a daughter, ...”

“... in Delphine, a novel set in France in the Revolutionary period. It was the first of two novels by Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, née Necker. Published in 1802 when its author was 36, it is at the same time a long fatal love story, a political drama, a historical novel, an Enlightenment apocalypse, and a female philosophe’s analysis of ...”

“... old. When Henry died Cranmer had been his Archbishop for 13 years, through the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and of Thomas Cromwell. It was Cranmer’s hand that Henry grasped at the last when his power of speech was gone to indicate the confirmation of his assured Christian belief. Legend has it that Cranmer grew the ...”

“... there was too much rainbow and not enough granite in her being. The missing granite is provided by Anne Lindell, Violet’s self-portrait in Broderie anglaise, no longer a character cloaked in legend like Sasha, a mirage disappearing into the distance. Far from being a ravishingly beautiful woman, she ‘wasn’t even pretty’. ‘Her features were ...”

“... overnight showed up on all the walls of my life inscribed simpliciter no explanation. What is the power of the unexplained. There he was one day (new town) in a hayfield outside my school standing under a black umbrella in a raw picking wind. I never asked how he got there a distance of maybe three hundred miles. To ask would break some rule. Have you ever ...”

“... usual ironic manner,said, ‘Alkibiades darling,you’re no fool after allif you see in me some power to make you better.It must be a kind of beauty vastly different than your own,a rare kind, an extraordinary kind –so what you’re proposingis an exchange of beauty for beauty?Now is that a fair deal? Your beauty for mine? Alleged for true?Sounds like the ...”

“... of music: but it compromises all life’s homely rituals, and it can’t comfort him. The power of form is manifest in the incomprehensible garments of the officials in The Trial, whose badges and straps and buckled flaps are the more terrifying to Joseph K. because they seem to have a significance out of his mind’s reach. Joseph K. himself begins ...”

“... familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named Anne Darquier, to whom she had become very close, and who had probably committed suicide. Were they related? They were, and for more than three decades Callil, conscious of a need to discharge a debt as both a patient and a friend, pursued Darquier, Vichy’s ...”