“... A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch was ...”

“... be locked up? Things become less clear when we increase the differences between the two bodies. (Emily Dickinson in Winston Churchill’s body? Martin Amis in Joyce Carol Oates’s?) We can reduce the impact of a strange body by imagining that the overall chemistry of the transferred brain is essentially the same as in the old body (no strange hormonal ...”

“... Austen wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not be ...”

“... fantasy world of a catalogue. Watching the Victorian scene of the pageant in Between the Acts, Mrs Jones marks the present moment by the thought that her daughter ‘has a refrigerator’. And the Times, in that novel, predicts an ‘after-the-war’ future: ‘Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the crannied wall. Each of us a free ...”

“... these other tones which are missing in The Ice-Pilot Speaks. Anne Stevenson compares Stainer to Emily Dickinson, but she reminds me more of Edith Sitwell, particularly the Sitwell of Façade, not in terms of rhythm (which Sitwell used quite skilfully and Stainer hardly uses at all) but in terms of emotional range and diction. Like Sitwell she has a taste ...”

“... her work was published and widely read in America, and an influence on American poets, including Emily Dickinson. Lonsdale seems to take no interest in religious poetry, which is under-represented in this volume, and perhaps on that account the selection of Rowe’s poetry suffers, as most of the best of it is religious. Pope was a problematic figure for the ...”

“... married not once but twice, and that despite all the research of such as Miller and Carole Seymour-Jones (whose biography of Vivien Eliot, Painted Shadow, figured Eliot as indubitably and actively gay), no smoking gun has been found. In his 1984 biography, Peter Ackroyd concluded that ‘all the available evidence suggests that when he allowed his sexuality ...”

“... terror, perhaps, has lately adorned itself with dreamy and snippy mannerisms’. Another puts Emily Dickinson words to showtunes when she finds herself under stress. The unacceptable appallingness of femininity, trapped in a body doomed to curdle and go haywire; the peculiarly American aesthetic of smoothing it over, waxing its eyebrows, doing it as ...”

“... to sell his work and to sustain relationships that remained important to him (with Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and with the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, whom he would call ‘daddy’). Lear’s travel journals and letters are full of observations that could have made it into nonsense poems: hedges ‘absolutely pink’, rocks like ...”

“... the initial A: Alfred Conrad (formerly Cohen) in 1953. In 1925, Arnold married the Episcopal Helen Jones from Atlanta and designed a long-sleeved black crêpe dress for her to wear as a uniform. Helen gave up her concert career, although she continued to play the piano every day. Holladay sees an unspoken contest that Adrienne’s mother lost from the ...”

“... at a party and became his dogsbody and apprentice, in an echo of the relationship between Burne-Jones and Rossetti, which began a few decades earlier. The following year, tasked with conveying Whistler’s painting of his mother to the Salon, Sickert met Degas for the first time (he also spoke to the dying Manet through a bedroom door, and visited his ...”

“... Jack has been number one for many years now, while Olivia has had to contend for top spot with Emily, Jessica and Grace – and there remains a tendency towards the classics. But the classics have been redefined more classically. Most of the classics of my generation no longer even figure in the top hundred. Andrew and Robert are barely hanging on. But ...”

“... in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like a get-out clause for my guilt ...”

“... the literary figures around her; and no one else in the novel comes near the erudite firepower of Emily Brightman, sprightly historian of late antiquity. Powell was a product of his class and period, with the blindspots these imply, but changes in gender roles were not lost on him. The notion of any particular sexism doesn’t stick. Spurling’s love of his ...”