“... law of nature, in the case of Nazism, or history, in the case of Stalinism. Because ideology ‘may decide that those who today eliminate races’ – or classes – ‘are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed’, terror must ‘fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim’. The purpose of totalitarianism, in ...”

“... would have carried on suffering in silence had it not been for McLachlan’s coming forward. This may all have been technically true, but it sounded politically false, because it was hard to believe that Costello had had no hand in the timing of the revelations. Finally, Costello came across as a man who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. As one ...”

“... included a couple of Bolshevik women from the Russian intelligentsia, one of whom (Ludmilla Stal) may have inspired his pseudonym. Fifteen affairs in two decades of mainly unmarried life in a free-living revolutionary milieu hardly qualifies Stalin as a womaniser, and Montefiore admits as much, noting that ‘women ranked low on his list of priorities, far ...”

“... For me the scene is deeply intertwined with the ending of persecution for homosexual acts. That may seem a leap, and it is not a point about empathy, or not only. Proust was extremely aware of the boldness of his material, and of the danger he was running regarding the obscenity laws and obloquy in his own social circles. John Sturrock, whose translation ...”

“... but first he should listen without interrupting. Then, as he deciphers the faded ink, a phrase may stand out which reveals the hand that wrote it. He may see – as suddenly as, at a turn of the passage, one comes upon one’s image in a mirror – a living face.This essay was published in its final form in 1984, four ...”

“... we point to a long series of such observations as are detailed below, made by women observers.It may have been unpaid labour, but it was also progress. Pickering called, and the ladies answered. More money came from another heiress – the blind painter, Miss Bruce – and more women came to be actually employed at the observatory, earning between 25 and 50 ...”

“... embedded in an anti-humanist view of subjectivity.These otherwise disparate intellectuals may have seemed more alike than they were, for they were united by a common enemy: existentialism. Sartre and Beauvoir and their adherents dominated the immediate postwar period in France. The new writers and theorists would have to slay the existentialist ...”

“... America’s attitude, the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, seemed to be: ‘Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us.’Service in the First World War also brought little lasting improvement in the Black condition. In the Crisis, the monthly publication of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois urged Black men ...”

“... not what to do.strain upon strain,sound surging upon sound,makes my brain blind;as a wave-line may wait to fall,yet (waiting for its falling)still the wind may take,from off its crest,white flake on flake of foam,that risesseeming to dart and pulseand rend the light,so my mind hesitatesabove the passionquivering yet to ...”

“... fact. For readers of a novel, the question ‘What is the gender affiliation of this narrator?’ may not seem particularly important. It certainly ranks much lower than ‘Do I want to go on reading?’ from which Sterling Karat Gold has nothing to fear.Maureen Duffy​ wrote two novels that play with gender ambiguity, Love Child (1971) and Londoners ...”

“... poems were written between 1914 and 1918 and a couple of years after. The only partial exception may be the religious verse he wrote in the last few years of his life, after converting to Roman Catholicism. Unfortunately, he was by then well into his seventies and too old to enjoy a second blooming such as that of his friend and hero Hardy. But there were in ...”

“... he has been living in a ‘cell’, ‘a poor cell’ in fact, or even a ‘full poor cell’. It may sound like a grotto, if a minimalist one, but it is never called that.Shakespearean drama would only acquire a grotto decades later. While Edmund is feigning remorse at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version ...”

“... kept her on the boards (against the advice of the majority of her critics) well into her fifties may be connected with a capacity to embarrass which often frays the edges of her writing.‘You can call me Colette’ isn’t a statement of the same order as ‘Call me Ishmael.’ The social limitations to experience in a woman’s life still preclude the ...”

“... his oddly artificial project, since Andrade had never been to the Amazon. A few months later, in May 1927, he got his opportunity, when he joined Penteado on a three-month steamboat cruise. He imagined it would be a repeat of the 1924 trip to Minas Gerais, a raucous modernist party. Instead, it was just him, Penteado, her niece and one of her niece’s ...”

“... as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death. Anne Higonnet’s new book is somewhat belied by its subtitle, which plays to the idea of fashion as ...”