“... Helen Oyeyemi’s​ latest novel, Parasol against the Axe, opens with a playful monologue from its narrator, the city of Prague. Prague has recently found its way – ‘who knows how’ – into a WhatsApp group ‘set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia’. ‘Some of the incidents referred to had taken place many years ago,’ it explains ...”

“... surveys, the 1500 poets here included will have shrunk to about fifty, and a good thing too. The small ‘mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease’ has now swollen to a throng of men and women who write with intent, and this reader, at least, shrinks before the sheer weight of publication represented by these 1500 writers of verse. Hamilton has included short ...”

“... is made to fit a paradigm of feminist outrage. This results in some missed opportunities, as in a small but significant moment when Pilkington quotes Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ to an English schoolmaster with whom she carried on a flirtatious correspondence two years before her death. Contemplating the thought of seeing her literary lover in the ...”

“... on anyone’s Parnassus’. This seems right to me – especially the ‘uncategorised’. The small tally of Edith Sitwell’s best poems has suffered from the attempt to put them into the accepted pigeon-holes of modern poetry – slots into which they do not fit. When you react against the Georgians you are supposed to turn into T.S. Eliot, and it is a ...”

“... were used freely as value-judgments in critical discourse. As Helen McNeil points out in her centenary study, Emily Dickinson entered the 20th century seeming to have written a series of ‘over-sensitive, coy, rather ill-disciplined poems’. Feminist critics have challenged this sexist view of her writing, and argued that ...”

“... feeble contrivance; – could make a better with great ease.’ Cockburn and Jeffrey were on the small side, and were elevated to the Bench. Smith on the latter: ‘His robes, God knows, will cost him little; one buck rabbit will clothe him to the heels.’ Smith was swept to fame by his contributions to the Review, ‘Lightness and flimsiness are my line of ...”

“... a souvenir: In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white, and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me. The wasps’ nest, rather than the map or the Atlantic Ocean, is now Bishop’s symbolic equivalent for art: an organic form (unlike her former inorganic monument in ...”

“... ingredient’ without which there would be ‘something sad, something futile’ about ‘the few small luxuries’ that remain. The apprehension of life as success or failure is now brought to bear on the delicate process of a bond being formed between a separated woman and a disappointed adventurer. Every encounter is examined accordingly. The first time ...”

“... enigmatic action is periodically accompanied by loud electronic buzzing. There are more mirrors: small and round, large and triangular, close-up and getting smashed with a hammer. Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) is a study of pictorial space, the performing body and Jonas’s relationship with certain eloquent objects, whose outlines she draws ...”

“... mines are huge, interconnected systems, with shafts at multiple levels. Some of the miners work in small groups, but there are also teams hundreds-strong that are controlled by armed gangs. The miners sell to the gang bosses, who sell to the syndicate bosses, who arrange for the gold to be taken overseas – often through the United Arab Emirates or ...”

“... to spurn new emphases. In a previous book about Stevens, Lentricchia upbraided Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler for ‘proceeding as if they had never read the poet’s letters and journals, or as if, having read them, they had come to the conclusion that the worldly life they found portrayed therein pertained to somebody else.’ But he sometimes proceeds as ...”

“... hard lesson to learn. The reader’s troubled stomach will not be soothed by the opening words of Helen Hodgman’s evocation of contemporary life in South London, Broken Words. The pond on the Common froze in the night. Thirteen ducks were caught by the feet. The big dog came along and bit each bird off at the knee. Later, the sight of a stubble of duck ...”

“... lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it. Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it ‘says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.’ Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of ...”

“... with 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 ...”

“... happens, we have got,/The Maxim gun and they have not’), but they were very small, and often outspeared if not outgunned. You would need a very compliant native population to Westernise to a significant extent with means as slender as these. Most Africans weren’t compliant. Simply controlling them was hard enough, and could generally ...”