“... an old plot device. Pamela complains about the important letter to her mother that is stolen; Tom Jones has to leave home because the letter that contains the secret of his birth is misdirected; Tess writes a letter of confession to Angel Clare, but it slips beneath the carpet and is never delivered. Letters have been an uncertain way to communicate in ...”

“... is just one more idiocy away from an uncontrollable guffaw. The interrogators are not all men – Emily Maitlis and Kirsty Wark on Newsnight, and Sarah Montague and Mishal Husain on Today – but the men set the tone. Looming behind them all is the ghostly presence of Jeremy Paxman and what he said was the unspoken question in any political interview: why is ...”

“... Massachusetts); others are less often commented on: ‘Cuscuscaraway’, ‘Usk’, ‘Bustopher Jones’. Though it may be possible to think of books by other poets which feature more poems named after people or places (Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is one), I doubt if there’s another major poet who had such a sustained talent for names and ...”

“... of a legal clerk and his wife. She went to Manchester Art School in 1871, as did her sisters Emily and Julia, where they were all prize-winning students, though frustrated by the scope of the tuition available to women and the restrictions imposed on the rewards. Life classes weren’t then available to women, and women weren’t allowed to exhibit at ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... boast equal longevity. Shortly after becoming rector of Lincoln College in 1861, Pattison married Emily Francis Strong, 27 years his junior. In her late teenage years, Strong ‘used to horrify her ordinary church friends . . . by her habit of doing penance for the smallest fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the bare floor or on the ...”

“... their daughter Margaret, and three servants – the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ‘desired it to be known that it was by the consent of his eldest son, William Corbett Roberts, who is already well provided for, that ...”

“... Carlson on Fox News, and posted photos of himself with Donald Trump Jr, Nigel Farage and Alex Jones. He has received a warm welcome on some of the podcasts credited with helping Trump win over young male voters. After Trump’s inauguration, Tate tweeted that ‘The Tates will be free, Trump is the president.’ Less than a month later the brothers were ...”

“... Those Englishmen most likely to sympathise with the new arrivals, whether Chartists like Ernest Jones or George Jacob Harney, ‘advanced’ publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or ...”

“... Bouk is able to reveal the names of some of those who were classified partners in 1940 – such as Emily H. Brand, a 29-year-old secretary, and Katrina S. Grant, a 27-year-old social worker – is the result of legislation which ensures the release of all personal data after 72 years. The rule represents another balancing of ideals: on the one hand, the ...”

“... handmade books of exemplary jokiness). Unreadability, McGann says, can be a virtue. The poems of Emily Dickinson, unpublished in her lifetime, test editorial practice. McGann’s account of them is an example of his methods. The manuscripts Dickinson left, many gathered in booklets of a few leaves sewn together at one corner, are difficult to read. The ...”

“... of night, and it seized and bound the imagination of Oswald.’ But this – the translation is Emily Baldwin and Paulina Driver’s from 1906 – is restrained by the standards of some of Wood’s own prose: ‘The mountain itself began to glow as streams of boiling liquefied rock coursed down its slopes … whole villages … had already been consumed ...”

“... Feathers insists on its status as a literary artefact from the title onwards, with that nod to Emily Dickinson, both homage and correction, since in her poem feathers accompany and denote hope. To be explicitly literary in this context is to be secondhand, insistently, even aggressively secondhand, and to disavow the raw subjectivity, unshaped by previous ...”

“... Meineck (1998) and many more free verse or prose versions (by Christopher Collard, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Peter Burian, E.D.A. Morshead and others). Sarah Ruden’s Oresteia (2016) demonstrated that the careful use of English metre, without rhyme, could be used to render Aeschylus in a poetic style that is difficult where appropriate without becoming ...”

“... is another such moment). But it also points to a shortcoming in the Parry-Lord hypothesis. As Emily Wilson put it in 2018, ‘there is still a very wide range of opinion about how, exactly, the words of many generations of illiterate and semi-literate bards turned into the written texts of Homer that we have.’Kutuzov didn’t accompany Parry on his ...”