“... colleague, who lived with his family in the main part of this pleasant early 19th-century, Jane Austenish house, in what remains the fine country village of Cottingham. When Bradford writes that ‘“Mr Bleaney” was of course the result of all this,’ he inadvertently shows not only that lives don’t completely explain poems, but that lives ...”

“... conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of London) Battalion (Poplar and Stepney Rifles), the London Regiment, who had died in the war and was buried near Amiens. Facts about him are scarce. My grandmother, whose only brother he was, has been dead now for twenty ...”

“... State Department diplomat and a DC socialite, she was an aspiring writer and a renowned beauty. In Jane Freilicher’s description, ‘with her golden hair, bright blue eyes and soft-spoken voice, it came as a surprise to find that she had a mind like a steel trap – she didn’t suffer fools gladly.’ Matthiessen had an exciting time as a student abroad. He ...”

“... on the Welsh borders and wrote a diary. Fond of little girls.’ ‘Oh,’ said the Queen, ‘like Lewis Carroll.’ ‘Worse, maam.’ ‘Dear me. Can you get me the diaries?’ ‘I’ll add them to our list, maam.’ Her Majesty closed the door and came back to her desk. ‘You see, you can’t say I don’t do my homework, Sir Kevin.’ Sir Kevin, who had ...”

“... read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them. It was Lewis Namier who began the work of demolition. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1928, he cited what he called ‘the literary afterthoughts of Edmund Burke and the latter-day Whigs’ as an example of the sort of source ...”

“... attracted by authoritarian rhetoric, he had the susceptibility of such contemporaries as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound to the politics of hatred. His infamous lines in ‘The Statues’ about the ‘filthy modern tide’ and its ‘formless, spawning, fury’ have the same period excess as D.H. Lawrence’s declaration: ‘To learn plainly to hate mankind, to ...”

“... Right), which argued that early human societies were matriarchal, found echoes in Engels and Lewis Henry Morgan, and in the 20th century in Freud and Lévi-Strauss. Kinship became a model for society. The 19th-century cultural history of the dead might also figure in any explanation. The monumental Mormon enterprise began in 1840 in Nauvoo, the town in ...”

“... confront her demons, Hani visited Waluś several times in prison; she had already met Clive Derby-Lewis, the ‘mastermind’ behind the killing, who provided Waluś with the gun. She had, she writes, been living in a ‘shroud of death’. In the years after her father’s murder her first serious boyfriend died after accidentally crashing his car into a ...”

“... work’. When Iseult began to share a flat with the highly unsuitable mistress of Wyndham Lewis, both Yeats and George arrived from Dublin and swooped on the place, as though they were her parents, and removed Iseult, Josephine her maid, her cat, her birds and her furniture to more decent quarters. George was less than two years older than her. Taking ...”

“... I knew only that I had to survive,’ Jane Lazarre writes about the process of giving birth.I pushed hard only because that was the only way to get the bastard out. And because pushing is not an urge; it is a demand backed up by all the violence your body, turned suddenly into an enemy, has at its command … pushing with all my might, I experienced for a moment what I would feel for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying ...”