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“... absence of evening dress ... Strange man enters into conversation with me ... (Query: Who was Sappho and what was Isle of Lesbos?)’ Watt does include part of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means set in the May of Teck, a women’s club, during the Blitz. For special occasions the girls share a taffeta evening dress by Schiaparelli, its warm ...”

“... by the college, bore the marks of individuality as well as an interest in fashion: Pater, Sappho, Stevenson, Thackeray, Whistler, ‘a book on Wagner’s operas’. Later she celebrated Trollope at a time when nobody read him. Against the current of opinion she admired George Saintsbury, and when she became editor of the Dial commissioned work from ...”

“... Most loyal and protective of Gurney’s many friends, Marion Scott wrote after one of her regular visits to the asylum: ‘Ivor is so heart-breakingly sane in his insanity.’ Letters, reported conversation, music, poems all attest to the fact. He was trained and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued ...”

“... more or less failures. Failure is writ large in the case of the archetypal ‘woman poet’, Sappho – a distorted and fragmentary figure who serves mainly to mother paradigms of self-indulgent emotionalism in female poets’ verse, and of self-destructive emotion in a poet’s life. In The Obstacle Race Greer was, by and large, sympathetic to the ...”

“... But only a handful of these lyrics are by known female authors. Nine are songs or fragments of Sappho, while others include the enigmatic Sulpicia, who might have been either an actual Roman poet or a female persona created by Tibullus; two trobairitz (Castelloza and the Comtessa de Dia); and ‘la Compiuta Donzella’, a Florentine whose pen name means ...”

“... resemble the texts he read as a Greek major at Harvard. The first passage here is by Sappho; the second by Cummings: [        ] Her[ Man[ And see[ms These girls al[l Topmost [ Wanders [ [            ] these [ [                ] Partner [ Own cousin [ Elbows [ Laughing away [ (Fields Elysian the ...”

“... women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution … Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d’Eon etc. These, and many more may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes as well as heroines, exceptional to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable ...”

“... suspect she is a hostile portrait of Nathalie Barney, who, like de Scudéry, used to call herself Sappho; through Barney, Mirrlees would have come across Apollinaire and Cocteau, the dominant influences on Paris. As the portrait of Mère Agnès suggests, Jane Harrison did not merely study myths, she generated them around herself. A few months after her ...”

“... to any suggestion of ill-health, is almost prepared to take literally Wycherley’s poem ‘To the Sappho of the Age, suppos’d to Ly-ln of a Love-Distemper, or a play’, with its predictable jokes about the female playwright being clapped). Following Duffy, Todd identifies the androgynously beautiful ‘Amyntas’ of the love poems as a debauched law ...”

“... songs; but for all their misogyny, Athenian men do not seem to have thought twice – singing Sappho, say, at a symposium – about assuming the persona of a girl. It is indeed striking, as Froma Zeitlin, among others, has observed, that Athenian citizens so often ‘played the Other’, women, barbarians, royalty, goddessess, slaves, but perhaps the ...”

“... of a butterfly or vulvic form, from Isabella d’Este’s brilliant swirls to the labial petals of Sappho and O’Keefe. The guests of honour include Kali and Boudica, Hildegard of Bingen and Natalie Barney. One can admire the sheer nerve of the piece, in particular the greedy elbows-out way in which it occupies space (The Dinner Party is often described as ...”

“... agent is a construct of early modern times is surely an exaggeration. Virgil and, indeed, Sappho certainly thought of themselves as authors more or less in the sense we use the term today, and the Greek tragedians, composing their plays for competitions, were scarcely anonymous members of teams of scribes. Another highly competitive literary culture ...”

“... Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of verse letters in the voices of such women as Penelope, Dido and Sappho, provided the basis for Chaucer’s own collection of women’s lives, The Legend of Good Women. The anonymous Old English elegies – The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament being the most famous – were meditations on loss and trauma that made effective ...”

“... them fidgeting; besides, it establishes character. Play up the absent-minded professor, quoting Sappho in Greek and cryptically vouchsafing the essence of ‘the most important piece of art-criticism that has appeared in Europe in modern times’ (a translation of Cennino Cennini’s 14th-century Libro dell’arte) as follows: ‘P.vi (Preface). First and ...”

“... stage. Here are Stoppard’s notes of keywords for Rock ’n’ Roll, among them ‘Sweet Bitter/Sappho, Vera/Mrs Thatcher, TS parallels’. Here is the dramatist in action at rehearsals for The Hard Problem, with zip-up pencil case, cracking peanuts, clipping nails (fingers presumably), eating diabetic sweets, urging the actors towards ...”