“... models, including her contemporaries Snodgrass and Lowell, the influence of Teasdale and Millay may have helped Sexton define herself confidently from the start as a woman poet. Apart from a brief lapse in Lowell’s workshop, when, in response to his reflex categorisation of women poets as ‘minor, definitely minor’, she expressed her fear of ‘writing ...”

“... of comparative order and solitude. The Rockefeller Centre’s ‘superbly solemn buildings’ may evoke a sense of safety and authority, as Medieval churches did, but to Sennett the famous landmark is ‘an abscess in the city’, spiritually as well as spacially ‘divorced from the community’. The coldness and impersonality of the American urban scene ...”

“... The heavy procession of pain along the nerve. It may be worth adding that the influence seems least assimilated when Reed must have been working fast, for the radio: in the verses from Pytheas (1947), here printed for the first time, the master too audibly presides over all. And somewhere behind Reed’s dream ...”

“... translated. Did young women ever say, ‘Sling your hook!’ when they meant ‘Piss off!’? It may be that the structure is too plain for the scale of the book. Flashbacks alternate steadily with chapters of ‘now’ narrative, climbing up from the wartime years until they merge with Kindl’s present. The effect is of a crescendo inviting a climax, but ...”

“... in what both see (Boruvka with much more reason) as a corrupt society. Skvorecky’s prose may be as terse as the translation makes it seem, but must surely be more lively and less repetitious. Boruvka is often overcome by ‘deep sadness’ and frequently gives ‘long sad looks’, but sad also are flowers in a vase, an abandoned shoe, and other ...”

“... the emphatic lesson of the memoirs is Tanizaki’s fond yearning for the past. Certain houses ‘may be inconvenient, as is often said, but they remind me of the old days, and I love them for it’. Of sacred dances at the Shinto shrines he writes, ‘I find myself longing to experience once more the atmosphere of those performances on a long, slow spring ...”

“... not challenging it’, and largely lacking in ‘philosophical profundity’. These judgments may be all very well as far as they go; there is certainly no need to see Korinna as a creative genius. But they fail to engage directly with the central problem of women’s writing within a male tradition. Was Korinna, as Snyder appears to suggest, simply ...”

“... fever, there were six children. The young widow took over his business; Toth argues that she may also have had an affair with a married roué, Albert Sampite, possibly the model for the seducers in her fiction. If so, it did not last long. In 1884, she returned to St Louis, and began to write. Her early magazine fiction was genteel and uplifting, but her ...”

“... seen by the locum, claims that the wrong twin has been foisted on him back in Australia. This may sound like a farce, but the story is full of enigmatic subtleties, the whole brilliantly handled. There are skilful though lesser stories in Part Three, and the whole book has a nostalgic feeling for Wales emphasised by a few poems, some of which, like ...”

“... a mob. The coup, and the response to it, have so far been very civilised affairs: the brutality may come ...”

“... licence of imagination, is represented as a beginning. This changed relation of end and beginning may modify our assumptions of causality. The idea is to say something new about our world by defamiliarising it and imagining another one. The reading of such a book is an exercise in what we could, if we felt like it, call enantiomorphology. If one asks whether ...”

“... up the last conversations or the last outbursts ... Unless already well-informed, the reader may be confused by the account of the crowded Cuban literary scene, with its fervours and feuds, its allegiances and animosities, though the cosmopolitanism and above all the passion for words come through clearly. The most touching passages in the book concern ...”

“... deep voice:    You will never grow old,    While there’s love in your heart,    Time may silver your dark brown hair,    As you dream in an old rocking chair ... She loved it when Gustad changed the song’s words from ‘golden hair’, always breaking into a big smile at the third line. Thereafter the plot becomes more and more ...”

“... towards revels registered by the Church authorities. Advent, Ascension Day, Hocktide, Lent, May Day and saints’ days – Laroque unpacks the calendrical significances of these and related occasions. If there are queries about dates, they are answered in the intricately assembled calendars which form the appendices. Laroque might be challenged on a ...”

“... of choosing different acts. Symbolic richness (the white whale, the Scarlet Letter A, Walden Pond) may reconcile writers and readers to the United States or, as in Melville’s Pierre, turn back on the interpreter in a nightmare of self-referentiality that cuts words off entirely from the world. But Pierre’s negative exception proves the positive-thinking ...”