“... name is one with glory’. Surely, in his own country, he wouldn’t permit the ‘savage destruction of a small unoffending Jewish family’. Eisenhower might indeed have preferred to save her – ‘it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in the case where a woman is to receive capital punishment,’ he told his son – but he feared ...”

“... within it, The Corrections sets itself apart from the work of contemporary American writers like Anne Tyler for whom the family never stopped being central. As well as looking inwards to family dynamics of love, hate and mutual incomprehension, Franzen looks outwards to the worlds of corporate power, government policy, science, economics and national ...”

“... cannot be sung. His operatic approach is, however, at the opposite pole to that of, say, the poet Anne Ridler, who meticulously produces ‘singing’ (syllabically integral) versions of Monteverdi’s stage works, and leaves her own artistic preoccupations to one side. The clarification of literary means effected by Muldoon, apparently on behalf of opera, is ...”

“... ogling chinless face, his scimitar-like mouth with its rows of gleaming teeth, the relentless and savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught …And so on. Yet shark attacks are an exotic rarity. There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to ...”

“... got engaged to a younger, richer woman; Lolly nursed an affection for Louis Purser, which ended in savage embarrassment. Their friendship had grown so intense that she assumed he felt as she did; then he kissed her goodbye after a visit, and she thought that this meant that they were engaged, and wrote to her English friend Emmeline Cadbury to tell her ...”

“... Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, Drew Barrymore, Kirsten Dunst, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet, but no matter: none of them has achieved the range and starry power that Kidman still possesses, despite a string of recent disappointments – Cold Mountain, The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter, Bewitched. Bullock ...”

“... other ruling families and gaining the wealth of a dowry, as in Henry II’s second marriage to Anne of Kiev. Princesses were also used to secure alliances. Adela, daughter of Robert II, was married to the duke of Normandy in 1027; after his death a few months later, she was married to the count of Flanders.Marriage and divorce could also wreak political ...”

“... that Parshley had cut at least 10 per cent of the original text, and showed that the most savage cuts affected Beauvoir’s account of exceptional women in history. She also demonstrated that Parshley had made a hash of Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary. After reading Simons’s essay, Beauvoir replied: ‘I was dismayed to learn the extent to ...”

“... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...”

“... yourselves?’ The boy said, theatrically: ‘Oh, because we’re not like you Americans. We are savage and primitive people.’ Journalists’ accounts have their flaws, however. Least satisfactory are their descriptions of the invasion. Most of them were either embedded with the troops rolling north – Oliver Poole, David Zucchino, or Evan Wright of ...”

“... had saved £8 from his pocket money and, instead of the expected bicycle, used it to buy a Queen Anne desk, which he kept all his life. He didn’t enjoy his first school, in Taunton, although his older, sportier brother, Max, was quite happy. Ede’s parents, in one of many moments that reveal them as more sympathetic and imaginative than Jim painted ...”

“... learn, ‘a human bloodhound from a race of brigands’. As Goldsworthy points out, the cut-throat savage from the mountains is still with us: That writing about the Balkans is a free-for-all, with no inhibitions about political correctness, is shown in a recent editorial in the Evening Standard which – following the news that Albania was to hold a ...”

“... interests, but who apparently got him to play golf, thereby much diminishing his stature as a ‘savage god’ in the eyes of his fishing buddies. Ted Hughes measuring up a putt … it’s like trying to imagine Heathcliff playing tiddlywinks. Revelations like this are more likely to do damage to Hughes’s reputation than Bate’s salacious accounts of his ...”

“... Sea, to their home in the west.’ Spenser relates the same history but degrades it by listing the savage customs derived by the Irish (who are Scots) from Scythia.Much has been written about what the View of the Present State of Ireland tells us about the Irish, who threatened Spenser’s estate in County Cork and later burned down his castle, but little ...”

“... in silent rage. It is clear from Dido Merwin’s account in an appendix to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Plath, that she could be intensely demanding and jealous. And in a letter to his brother after the break-up of the marriage in 1962, Hughes refers to ‘Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality’, before saying that they are now ...”