“... enters it in Book III of The Faerie Queene, and finds that she both is and is not in Bluebeard’s castle. ‘Romance’ is the most nebulous and ill-defined of literary genres, at moments seeming to embrace almost all non-realistic fiction, whether in prose or verse, narrative or dramatic form. It can even mesh with epic, as ‘the matter of ...”

“... an idea – ‘a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’; or the safe domestic medieval ‘Castle’ that Christabel begins her poem by leaving to pray ‘in silence’, leaving behind for ever the unambiguous virgin forms of her simple uncorrupt self. But it is the Ancient Mariner that has the most complete, most objective and narrational of these ...”

“... ridicule, as in the case of Clare Booth Luce’s play, The Women. The extraordinary success of Barbara Pym’s novels in America shows they seem to minister to the same assertiveness, and the same desire for separation. A perennial Pym scene, drawn from life once or twice in her Diaries, is of the women’s part of the office, and the calm insolence with ...”

“... of recent years: there’s an intriguing, speculative account of the Thesmophoria, for example, by Barbara Smith in the current issue of Baetyl. (This new journal coincidentally takes its name from the black stone into which the goddess Cybele metamorphosed in order to escape Zeus on one of his rampages – more flesh and stone in opposition.) Sennett follows ...”

“... and Oprah is the black Cinderella, the abused girl with the broom who one day takes over the castle. But how poor was Oprah? Dirt-poor and fatherless, according to her own story, but Kelley sets out to undermine this sweet litany of underprivilege. ‘I never had a store-bought dress or a pair of shoes until I was six years old,’ Oprah is quoted as ...”

“... Liberal, rationalist Murrays, with Lady Mary’s aristocratic connections to the Howards of Castle Howard, were more priggish than piggish, and this suited Toynbee nicely. They were admirable parents-in-law (ultimately ex-parents-in-law) and Toynbee formed a lifelong attachment to them as ‘my parents as well as Rosalind’s’. Whether Rosalind ...”

“... profoundly reminiscential, nostalgic, obscurely looking back, so that the murderous court and castle are nonetheless eerily cosy, as if we had always lived there. This familiarity may be explained at one level by the fact that the tragedy is so deep-rooted in our literature, our culture, even our schooling, and its first audiences perhaps savoured in much ...”

“... service, in chantries to be founded in the parish church of Sible Hedingham, and in the convent of Castle Hedingham. Death overtook him before he could set out on his homeward journey, on 17 March 1394. It is a measure of how he was esteemed in England that a year later King Richard wrote formally to the Florentine Signoria, asking that his remains be returned ...”

“... at forest feasts, uses disguise to trick his enemies, and survives the dangers of town and castle.’ This core is supplemented by a ‘pattern of interlocking themes’ which usually differ on one point or another from plot to plot but attach themselves to Robin to give us a Venn diagram of the Robin Hood we now know and ...”

“... topic – phallic symbolism’, an incident that probably led to their friend and fellow communist Barbara Niven’s malicious cartoon of a monstrous swimsuited Willa beside a Bambi-like Edwin – a ‘little doe licking her fingers’. Several decades later, this drawing still hung above the MacDiarmids’ hearth – an emblem of a personal and literary feud ...”

“... intimacy with him – will not find it in Two Lives. (Perhaps something has yet to emerge: Barbara Will, a Dartmouth professor, is presently working on a book called Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma.) The more Malcolm reveals of his history, for example, the more loathsome Faÿ sounds. Animated by her ...”

“... make us good, as George Steiner despairingly observed in his sombre study In Bluebeard’s Castle, and Tucker refers to Steiner’s book in a similar context to mine. ‘While love of the arts may ennoble some individuals,’ Tucker writes, ‘elsewhere the same arts may act as a type of drug through which people can temporarily escape from the ...”

“... on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous homage to Acker by rewriting – or, rather, parodying – her work that same year in the New York art journal, ZG. To Kruger, herself well-known for her appropriation of pre-existing images, Kathy Acker’s writing seemed that of a ...”

“... of this inner dialogue can be hard to take, and can even be crude. In A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, which is commonly known by the name of its villain, the sensuous enchanter Comus, the chaste Lady (oh, no self-portrait there then, from the poet known as the Lady of Christ’s) hears music, and then abruptly throws off its alluring charms with a string ...”

“... by these joys, the reader is swept into them as if with Kubla Khan in Xanadu, or in Keats’s castle on the Eve of St Agnes. Betjeman’s joys and sorrows go straight back to the early Romantics. He is not a bit like Hardy and Philip Larkin, who are often associated with him. No comparison could be more misleading. Their idiom is one of deprivation, of ...”