“... a stivver to poor Eddy, in fact I think he was owed a lot of wages!’ With his mother and her ‘savage loving’ out of the picture, the world he grew up in is apparently less distressing to contemplate (and more available as material for works like All That Fall). The cher maître treatment he gets elsewhere also seems to make him eager to keep up with ...”

“... of humour who humanised her husband as far as anyone could, not least in their shared love for Anne, their Down’s-syndrome daughter. When she died at the age of twenty, de Gaulle allegedly said to Yvonne after the funeral: ‘maintenant elle est comme les autres’ – which, if authentic, is the most touching remark of his ever to have been ...”

“... have omitted much that is interesting and revealing, but the omission of Bishop’s letters to Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about her work, seems odd. These letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The ...”

“... that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen ...”

“... is behind that, and it is behind the destruction of the countryside too. For all the savage reductions of recent times, farming still employs too many and produces too much: even before the end of February, when diseased livestock burned on funeral pyres 130 feet high, some farmers were killing their own livestock for want of a profit, or to save ...”

“... Chicago love affair to the political tribulations of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for ...”

“... video footage of Knox as a child. A Seattle-based group called Friends of Amanda was formed by Anne Bremner, a criminal lawyer who set herself up as a spokesperson for the Knox family. The Knoxes also hired a PR guru called David Marriott to prepare press releases for the American media. An American author called Douglas Preston, who had written a book ...”

“... in these early Histories. Richard’s real power surely emanates – as the sinister wooing of Anne will at once make plain – from the symbolic (though of course historical) crookback in itself: from the oddly undeceptive, doggish body that humps and thumps its way forward to the dead centre of the stage, saying first by its sheer presence what it thinks ...”

“... impatient with waiting, anxious and fearful, but eager for apocalyptic conflict with a savage enemy.Waiting for the Messiah turns out to be a lot like waiting for the barbarians. In J.M. Coetzee’s great novel, much time in the imperial outpost is spent waiting for an apocalyptic event, a showdown with the barbarians who must be obliterated by the ...”

“... her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride ...”

“... or, more accurately, that was when the fire burned itself out. It was perhaps the longest and most savage 24 hours in London since 10 May 1941, when 505 German bombers flew under a full moon and bombed the city relentlessly through the night. The destruction, William Sansom said of the air raid that killed 1436 Londoners, ‘was noticeable in the morning ...”