“... was to continue Barrett’s thought in the strange, feverish poem ‘Mesmerism’. Martineau may have been a tougher character than Barrett could envisage – a journalist, after all – and some of the sympathy may have been misplaced; but not Barrett’s admiration for a woman who shunned ‘the tendency of women ...”

“... Sometimes Mullis says the creative spirit came on an evening in April of 1983, sometimes in May. Anyway, the buckeyes were in bloom; Mullis’s little silver Honda Civic was purring through the vineyards and redwoods of the Anderson Valley; and his mind wandered. Life is sweet, he thought: ‘I am a big kid with a new car and a full tank of gas. I have ...”

“... side of the border, declaring the diversionary nature of all Lancastrian texts to be axiomatic may seem as much a disabling manoeuvre as an enabling one, since it substantially forecloses on the possibility that a document really can mean what it says. The more carefully wrought a text is, the more fruitful Strohm’s assumption generally proves to be, but ...”

“... She destroyed her own papers, and told her story as she wished it to be heard. Arthur Jones may or may not have been the father of her secret child; it was just as likely that Jeanne was the daughter of the Prince of Wales or Louis Battenberg. But he accepted the role, from something of a distance, and while she hid ...”

“... critics, richly rewarded dealers and ambitious museum curators and directors. Of course, this may be the outcome: Enwezor’s Documenta 11 may be remembered as an event with more of a political than an artistic character, easily marginalised and dismissed. On the other hand, perhaps it will be remembered, in Enwezor’s ...”

“... but he was aware of the potential of civic government. He recognised that the Victorian burgher may have seen himself as the arch-opponent of collectivism – ‘“Socialism, Sir?” he’d say: “Don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that’s what made our city what it ...”

“... household. The genetic ancestor of the warm and reassuring place into which Calliope/ Cal is born may be Greek, but its fictional ancestors, more conventionally stagey, are movie-derived: Jewish families from the Bronx. The backchat never stops, and Milton is its finest proponent. He’s a lovable contrarian: he is known for complaining about the price of ...”

“... and wrote that ‘the sensory consciousness of a person, though apparently located in the brain, may also be conceived of as also existing like a faint echo in space, or in other brains.’ Such finely calibrated sensors between sensitive souls, such tremulous, responsive, imponderably harmonised bodies, appear in the writings of Henry James, Virginia Woolf ...”

“... he was bullied and insulted. (An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 1 May 1937 advised that ‘the proposed Federal venture into the interstate control of cannabis hardly seems to be justified by experience . . . After more than twenty years of Federal effort and the expenditure of millions of dollars, the opium and cocaine ...”

“... they snivel, how they demand our attention and sympathy. Still riding on a wave of sentiment that may not have had much more energy left in it, the Princess of Wales timed her exit impeccably. It is tempting to think that Richard Branson also understood, if only unconsciously, that public adulation is likely to tire and turn into its own ...”

“... to Lucretia, he quoted Burke to justify his claim that ‘the image of crime, made execrable, may pain and revolt us, but for that very reason, it does not allure or corrupt.’ It was partly such self-justifications that provoked James Thomson’s judgment on Bulwer-Lytton in 1874: ‘he was one of the most thorough and hollow humbugs of the age; false ...”

“... Belgrade, one of the most popular of his dialogue operas. However insipid and one-dimensional we may find much of Salieri’s music, there is no doubting its contemporary appeal. Little was recorded about Salieri himself before his friend Mosel got to work. Michael Kelly evidently found him engaging; Lorenzo da Ponte thought him pompous. Into this void all ...”

“... affronted national pride: ‘The English like to think they like to laugh at themselves. This may have been true once when there was no apprehension that the Sun might one day Set. But it is not true today. The good ship Britannia is waterlogged in a shark-infested sea. Don’t rock the boat’. I think now, as I thought then, that this was well over the ...”

“... poems as well. I haven’t seen them yet, but I doubt if they will be much good. Of course, they may be, but I have my misgivings. Anyway, what does he want with publishing poems: it is no time for poetry. God knows what it is a time for. Larkin, of course, was no slouch when it came to skewering his literary rivals. In these early years, though, he is ...”

“... outward relationship with Denis, is an area about which we know very little, and about which there may be little to know. Certainly there is scant evidence of such indulgences in Campbell’s analysis of the final stages of her journey to Number Ten. Like any very ambitious person, and especially any very ambitious woman, she played it very carefully when ...”