“... is quite hard at the moment. She has received a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press ...”

“... as many constraints and fewer comforts. The hoped for careers rarely developed. The bohemian man may have idealised women as muses and models but he was unhampered by bourgeois obligations to be faithful or to earn money, though rarely was he so unconventional as to undertake any housework or childcare. The bohemian woman with children was as much shackled ...”

“... symbol of the vacant crossroads Though Cunard didn’t write the best modernist long poem, she may at least be in with a chance in the ‘Best Modernist Title’ category. The parallax effect is defined by Thomas Browne in the poem’s epigraph: ‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper ...”

“... transform his critical reputation, as his admirers believe is his due? The contributors to Will May’s volume have had access to Prince’s papers, which became available on the centenary of his birth in 2012, and many of them quote fascinating material culled from this archive. His poetry is approached from all sorts of angles: we get Derek Attridge on ...”

“... Here.’ Demands that immigrants ‘go home’ resurface to this day. Four years ago, when Theresa May was home secretary, the Home Office launched a campaign to scare people living in Britain illegally into leaving the country. Large white vans were driven around the country carrying posters bearing the injunction ‘GO HOME OR FACE ARREST.’Olusoga believes ...”

“... there was a spouse who had seen this mark as recently as this morning. I imagined her (you may think me presumptuous to assume that his spouse was a woman, given my own particular circumstances, but there was something in his demeanour that suggested to me that he had never touched a man without anger or force or anxiety, and even now he touched the ...”

“... birds began to sing./Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?’ Far-fetched as it may seem, that singing pie might actually have happened. At the other end of the spectrum, heroic fasting could be equally impressive. Monks and nuns renounced meat, largely because animal foods were believed to awaken lust. But late medieval holy women, the true ...”

“... of what he recorded Hitler as having told him was invented or copied from other sources. There may be some accurate reporting in his book, but it is so mixed up with Rauschning’s own subjective representation of Nazism that it’s now virtually impossible to identify. Kurlander is of course aware of all this, but he still uses Rauschning when it suits ...”

“... is not harmony, as Treadwell had wilfully supposed, but ‘chaos, hostility and murder’. It may not have been quite that simple. The only way Treadwell could conceal from himself the abstractness of his love for the bears was to create around them an equal and opposite abstraction, also masquerading as real: a vision, precisely, of the universe as ...”

“... and despairingly insisted on his own contribution to that struggle. The war, he told Ada in May 1943, following the dambuster raid that drowned the Möhne valley, was becoming a ‘Jews’ war’. As late as the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944 the Noldes were glued to their radio, hoping for an Endsieg and railing against Germany’s racial ...”

“... seems haunted by the ethical responsibilities incurred when writing about real people. ‘How far may writers go in exposing those close to them to public scrutiny, sacrificing them for the writer’s own pleasure?’ he asks in My Life as a Russian Novel.This is the sort of unresolvable question Carrère favours. But he is adamant that, at the very ...”

“... another sort of challenge. What does it mean that Emira has no social media accounts? She may be abstaining to save her sanity, but she is also missing out on the opportunity to comment on her life and image, even as it goes viral. That’s where Alix’s cover letter-writing workshops are important: here is a woman who has mastered the problem of how ...”

“... civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating influence of Christianity, but essentially they emphasised the classical origins of the civilisation which educated elites in Europe and the US claimed to defend. There were few major politicians in the first half of the 20th ...”

“... to Basing House, where he and what was left of his straggling army licked their wounds. On 21 May the victor, Waller, once again lined up Basing House in his sights but was ordered to Oxford instead. Still in the area, however, was Colonel Richard Norton. In the first week of June the Royalist garrison was catastrophically ambushed by Norton while out on ...”

“... Italian, Catholic, a pianist, remarried – and an ageing Protestant Swiss-German father. There may be a brother, maybe dead, there may be a grandmother who likes flowers better than people (‘It only seems like a nice thing. Taking an interest in nature’). It’s a world of fine houses, good ...”