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“... retrospective baptisms, a practice that has caused protests when, for example, Jewish figures like Anne Frank have been made ‘saints’. Nevertheless necronominalism is the order of existence here in the West, and our own magical thinking underlies the public chanting of the names of the victims of Aids or of 9/11 – the ritual strives both to exorcise ...”

“... at the heart’ of this biography of Queen Mary. What steaming titbit can her fellow American, Anne Edwards, biographer of film stars, have turned up at this late hour? Can it really be that rather overworked rumour that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can. James Pope-Hennessy did not find room to discuss ...”

“... humanity of ordinary babies or marvel at it. In a woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, dated 1511, St Anne is fondling the infant’s genitalia, while he chucks the Virgin under the chin, an amorous gesture with a tradition going back to the Song of Songs (and here signifying their mystical marriage), while Joseph looks understandingly on. Steinberg (who throws ...”

“... travelling into Manhattan to see plays in the $1.89 seats on Broadway, starting with The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956. ‘I remember thinking … Why couldn’t I play the part? I felt I could do it just as well as Susan Strasberg.’ Her talent, especially at the beginning, was a product of her ambition rather than the other way around; when she played a ...”

“... symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure – Anne Frank, let us say.’ That’s a pretty loaded insinuation. As late as 2005, Ozick, speaking at Harvard, was still condemning Styron’s decision to position a non-Jewish protagonist at the narrative centre, thereby diluting, obscuring and ultimately ...”

“... Anne Lister was undoubtedly one of the most unorthodox women of the early 19th century. She was an active and entirely unashamed lesbian, a scholar, a dauntless traveller and a resourceful businesswoman. As an example of what female tenacity could achieve in the pre-Victorian period, she might be seen as a fortifying ideal ...”

“... touchstones (Wittgenstein and the Tractatus), and artists who were fashionable at the time (Frank Stella, Donald Judd). Or so the published transcription tells us. As typed by Baldwin on a shiny surface called Mirralon (a mysterious medium that looks like silvery plastic foil, but is apparently unknown to Google), communicative coherence breaks ...”

“... published in the early Sixties, another full-length study might need some justification. But Anne Taylor has compressed Besant’s inordinately eventful ‘lives’ into a managable book half the size of Nethercot and pulled the threads together into a single life. Both contemporaries and earlier biographers tended to divide Besant’s career into two ...”

“... were all self-consciously poètes maudits, and they all died before Lowell. So did his pupils Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Dying at 60, Lowell, for all his self-destructive ways, was a survivor. Speaking of life in Boston during one of his spells there, Lowell tells Bishop that ‘in some groups we’ – he and his wife – ‘seem unspeakably strange ...”

“... All​ Thayer has is money,’ Sherwood Anderson wrote to Waldo Frank in 1919 about the man who’d just become co-owner and editor of the Dial. Anderson advised Frank to demand a good price for his work: if Thayer ‘does not surrender the money, he is N.G. to anyone’. Scofield Thayer surrendered a lot of money, lavishing it on the artists he admired, and on many he didn’t, including his former friend T ...”

“... and no doubt it contributed, visibly and invisibly, to her success. It may even have been what Frank Capra had in mind when he produced the somewhat confused statement that ‘there are women and there are women – and then there is Kate. There are actresses and actresses – then there is Hepburn.’ The Garbos and Monroes had been nothing until they ...”

“... proliferated voluntary societies which were devoted to philanthropic endeavour. According to Frank Prochaska, it was in these changed and challenging circumstances that British monarchs first turned their attention to the sort of deliberate, large-scale charitable activity that their forebears had disdained, but with which we are now all so ...”

“... of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun with speech, a habit learned from Frank O’Hara (‘I think on the whole I would rather read/ Frank O’Hara than Geoffrey Chaucer,’ writes Geoff Hattersley). And it is true that a fighting politics seethes in poets like Sean O’Brien and Simon ...”

“... for him.When I first met William Feaver, I had recently had a baby: Lucian’s and my son, Frank Paul, whom I had left with my mother. My mother was Frank’s main carer during his babyhood and early childhood. I left him with her so that I could continue to paint, and so that I could continue to sit for ...”

“... the campaign which led up to the fall of Singapore. In his brief and telling introduction Frank Kermode puts his finger on the way Piper constructed the young man and his provenance in order to bring out his mode of thinking and reacting. He comes from a background no doubt very similar to Piper’s own. It is one that crops up frequently in this ...”